


The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

by MeteorAtDusk



Series: The Ghosts that Linger [2]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe, Canon-typical language, Gen, Haunted Houses, Horror, Mental Institutions, Mentions of Suicide, Mentions of previous major character death, RvB Big Bang, Underage Drinking, past Agent Carolina/Agent York - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 20:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9920690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeteorAtDusk/pseuds/MeteorAtDusk
Summary: Tex isn’t afraid of anything, especially not ghosts, curses, or other superstitious nonsense.  So when someone bets she wouldn’t last an hour in the campus’ favorite haunted house it should be a walk in the park, right?  And solving the mystery?  Easy.  Getting into the Church House, on the other hand, might be a little more difficult unless she can convince someone to help her…Sequel to The Ghosts that Linger.  This is a sequel, but it's new reader friendly, so you won't be lost if you didn't read the first one.  However, that means that if you are interested in reading the previous story you might want to read it first, or risk being completely spoiled for the plot.(Title from the 1947 film)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Here we are! Welcome to the Ghosts that Linger interlude, which takes place between Part I and the as yet unwritten Part II. This story might not be quite what you expect, but I hope you enjoy it! I had a great time writing it for the Big Bang, and I want to thank @churchwash for drawing some absolutely amazing art for it!! 
> 
> WARNINGS for this fic include: underage drinking, canon-typical language (swearing and some ableist language, especially in regards to mental illness), fictional depiction of mental health hospitals and mentions of involuntary commitment and psychological abuse, violence, suicide, blood, strangling, minor self-harm, discussions of events in the previous story which include major character deaths, murder, attempted suicide, attempted arson, a car accident, and traumatic eye injury.
> 
> ...To head off the obvious question, the Tex in this story has absolutely no connection with the house or anything that went on there before this story is set. I could make noise about how the show also has two versions of Tex, but to be honest with you I just really wanted a living, breathing Tex in this AU and that's pretty much all there is to it.
> 
> Also, I should say that the outward appearance of Saint Dymphna's is somewhat based on a real place (Broughton Hospital in North Carolina), but beyond that Dymphna's is entirely fictional - basically I saw photos of it and liked the look of the building.
> 
> Thank you for reading!

 

 

“Have you heard about the States?”

That was how the story usually started, a hushed whisper in the dark laced with ominous excitement and gleeful foreboding.  It was the favored topic of midnight excursions or half-drunken bonfires, a tale only ever told at night because no other time would do it justice.  It was that one campus legend that would never die because it had all the elements of immortality; it was gruesome, it was frightening, it happened nearby.  It also had the one thing that most other stories like it lacked.

It was true.

“Did they tellya ‘bout the States yet?” was the opening when she first heard it, way back in orientation, before the name Tex had cemented itself in her mind and usurped her identity, when she was still Allison, stumbling back to the dorms half-drunk in the early hours of the morning, reveling in new freedom and independence.  Later, much later when there was no stopping it, no changing it (not that she would), later when she looked back and tried to remember how it all started she would recall this conversation.  The first time she heard about the States, a story told in the dark by a person she no longer remembered the name or face of, because it hardly mattered who it was.  It could have been anybody.

“Which states?” she asked.

“ _The_ States, the-the _States_ ,” said her companion, whose name, she thought later, might have stated with a J.  Jensen, maybe, or Jimmy?  “They were students, y’know, all named after states or something, I’unno.  They lived in this big ol’ fuck-off house way past the other side of town, right?”

“Right,” she answered when the pause went on too long.  She was a little tipsy after the party, her first college party right out of the gate with booze and dancing and music, and she was flush with the excitement of breaking the rules, breaking the law, but she wasn’t _stupid_.  Probably-a-J-name had far more to drink than she had, an arm slung over Allison’s shoulder just to keep upright.

“Right,” Maybe-Jimmy repeated, listing slightly to the side.  “Big names on campus, too, like, captains of the football team an’ shit.  But they were, get this, they were… they were like… _cursed_.”

“Cursed,” she said flatly, the word seeming silly even through the brand new fog of endless possibility and plausibility that alcohol supplied her with.  “That’s fucking stupid,” she decided.

“Nonono,” Might-have-been-Jason slurred.  “’strue.  Some crazy shit went down and like, half of them _died_.  Said their house was haunted.  One of ‘em had their eye ripped out by a _ghost_ , and one of ‘em tried to-to kill ‘emselves.  Got locked up in the nuthouse.  But that’s not even the weirdest part.”

“What’s the weirdest part,” she asked, curious despite herself.

“Okay this is, this is the really freaky part, right?” Actually-could’ve-been-a-G-name-but-definitely-a-guy, now-that-she-thought-about-it paused dramatically both in dialogue and mid-step, and nearly tripped over his own feet.  She hauled him back upright against her better judgment and he continued on. “Even the ones that didn’t live with ‘em got fucked up.”

“What, you think the ghosts followed them home?” she asked, amused.

“The _curse_ ,” he said, waving a hand wildly and almost hitting her in the face.  She considered just dumping his ass there, but they were almost back anyway and she liked it when people owed her favors.   “They say, right, they say the ones that didn’t live there tried to burn the place to the ground, but they got caught.  And they were going to be locked up for arse—for ass—for fucking setting it on fire, right?  But they never even made it to trial!  Like, there was a car accident.  Big fireball.  Everybody died.”

“You are so full of shit,” she said, at last hauling him through the dormitory door.

“Iss true!  Swear!” he said as she dumped him less than gently on the ratty couch in the lobby.  “Ask anyone!  Ask ‘em about the States!”

“Sure thing, asshole,” she said, rolling her eyes.

That was the end of it, more or less, a tale told by a drunk guy she barely knew who then tried to cop a feel.  She told him that if he ever tried it again they would never find his body, and then she left him and his dumbass slurred ghost story in the lobby.  That should have been the end of it, because she had no interest in urban legends that someone’s friend’s cousin swore up and down happened to their grandfather on campus sixty years ago.  Allison had classes in the morning and a hangover cure to devise, more important things to think about.

That could have been the end of it.

But the next morning she walked into her first Criminology 101 class, head held high and confident and not aching even a little bit, and she met her new classmates, her new professor, and the new TA.

“You guys can call me York,” he said with a friendly smile that had just enough bite to be interesting, jagged scars fanning out like red lightening from the corner of one blank white eye.

That was the beginning.

 

*

 

It wasn’t like it became her first priority.

Tex wasn’t just there to have fun, she had work to do, and more importantly she was stubborn.  Knowing there was a kernel of fact in an urban legend made it more interesting, sure, but that didn’t stop it from being fucking stupid.  Curses, ghosts, and demons couldn’t wipe the face of humanity from a murder, they were just convenient excuses for people who didn’t want to believe how low ordinary people could stoop.  Tex didn’t buy in to pretty lies.  She could admit that she didn’t know all the mysteries of the universe, of course, but she was a student of criminology, and she knew that behind every stabbing there was someone holding the knife.  You just had to know where to look, and that was exactly what she was there to learn.  A mystery was only a mystery until it was solved.

_Ghosts_ were not a satisfying answer to her.  Crimes were committed by people, and someone had to be held accountable for them.  You couldn’t arrest a ghost, couldn’t make it serve time, you just had to shrug and hope it didn’t happen again.  Blaming the spirits wasn’t just lazy, it made the whole system fall apart.  With ghosts there was no punishment, no justice, and no stopping them.

She couldn’t punch a ghost until it knew better.

Still…

Some mysteries took a long time to solve.  There was that seed of doubt, taking root and growing in the back of her mind, and every time she heard the story she had to wonder _what if_.  The logical side of her realized it was that feeling that kept the tale alive, that shiver of the unknown and the impossible that captured the imagination of the student body and prompted them to rehash the legend at every opportunity.  The logical side of her knew that.  The far bigger, more rebellious, bullheaded side of her insisted that she was better than the skittish masses and provoked her into rolling her eyes whenever she heard it.

Honestly, in the end that was what actually got her in trouble.

That, and her pride.

“Bullshit,” she announced, plunking her drink back on the coffee table and leaning back into the ratty sofa cushions to put her feet up beside the empty bottle.  Her boots made a satisfying, heavy sound as they hit the cheap wood, and it bowed slightly under their weight.

The party was a pretty typical Friday night affair, with a steady flow of students and booze and no one checking either for age or quality.  It was very late or very early, and things were winding down.  People were starting to stumble away and the night had taken on that almost dead feeling that sinks into the air after a good party when more than half the guests have gone home.  It was exactly the atmosphere, as the clock ticked past two or three in the morning, that always had the boys bringing out the terrifying tale of the States and their misfortune, each version more bloated and ridiculous than the last.  Tex had been listening to this garbage for over a year now, and with the end of October coming up fast it felt like she’d heard nothing else for weeks.

She was done with it.

“Excuse me?” said the story-teller, somewhat taken aback, although he recovered quickly.  He actually looked mildly offended that she wasn’t hanging on his every word, the smarmy fucker.

“You heard me,” Tex said, never one to back down once she’d started a fight.  “It’s bullshit.  I mean, yeah, maybe it’s a little creepy the first time you hear it, but seriously?  Anyone with half a brain can figure out it’s just a campfire story.  Get some new material, your make-believe ghosts are beating a dead horse.”

One of the guy’s friends actually snorted quietly at that, ducking his head to hide a smirk.  The other one, the big guy with the ponytail, didn’t lighten his perma-scowl even a little, but he was paying attention now, steel blue eyes abandoning their attempt to stare a hole into the table and shifting to her instead.  The storyteller himself was giving her a narrow-eyed look that Tex recognized through years of experience as _recalculating_. 

She tossed her blonde hair over her shoulder and gave him a smile that was more teeth than sincerity.

“Oh really?” he said, unable to hide the slight irritation in a voice that until that moment had been as smooth as butter and, like butter, left her feeling just a little bit greasy.  “So I guess that means you know all about it, then.”

Tex snorted.

“I think everybody’s heard it enough times that we should all be experts by now,” she grumbled.

The guy sat back, and there was a glint in his eyes that she noticed but couldn’t quite place, something goading and just shy of predatory.

“Alright then, miss expert,” he said, “why don’t you tell us what _really_ happened.”

Tex raised an eyebrow at him.

“It can’t be that hard to figure out,” she replied.  “Has anybody actually tried, or did they all just run home to mommy crying ghost?”

He smirked at her, turning away and reaching out to pick up his own drink, the one Tex was about ninety percent sure was empty.

“That’s what I thought,” he said dismissively, taking a sip that had to be pure theatrics.  “You talk big but you just don’t want people to think you’re scared.  I bet if you actually went out there you wouldn’t last an _hour_ before, ah, running home crying to mommy.”

Tex narrowed her eyes.

The air in the shabby living room was focused, stifling, full of the lingering memory of too many bodies and far too much alcohol.  Tex had been to enough parties at that point to know how to pace herself, how to have a good time but stay wary and watchful.  She knew how to get buzzed but not drunk, and she always trusted her instincts.  Right at that moment, every instinct she had was insisting that she should punch this douchebag in the face.

Metaphorically, more was the pity.

Tex leaned forward with a grin like a shark.

“How much?” she asked.

The guy paused, and for a moment he actually looked flat-footed.

“What?” he said, skeptically, clearly thinking he had misheard her.

“How _much_ do you bet?” she repeated.

She had definitely caught his attention now.

“Oh no,” muttered one of his friends, putting one hand over his eyes, and that was when she realized she recognized him, a face she saw frequently but rarely spoke to.  He was in several of her criminology classes, usually sitting at the back, quiet and serious with the occasional pointed question.  “Gates—”

“A hundred dollars,” the storyteller, presumably Gates, interrupted promptly, the challenge clear in his eyes.  “But only if you go _inside_.  And you have to prove it.”

“How the hell do you expect me to do that?”  Tex scoffed.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Gates replied, leaning back.  “Maybe take a photo.  Girls like that sort of thing, right?”

“You are acting like children.  This is ridiculous,” his friend said.  “And illegal.”

“Or better yet,” Gates continued, ignoring him, “bring something _back_.  A trinket from the haunted house to prove your courage.”

“Easy money,” Tex declared, still grinning.

“Trespassing,” his friend went on, undeterred, “breaking and entering.”

“Give it a rest, Mase,” Gates said, rolling his eyes.  “We’re just having some fun.”

“Burglary,” countered Mase – Mason, Tex remembered suddenly.  She had definitely done a group project with him before, now that she thought about it.  In retrospect it was possible she should be a little friendlier with her classmates, or at least try to remember their names, but Tex wasn’t really a people person at the best of times.  “That is what you just suggested.”

“You and your morality,” Gates said, as though it was an obnoxious hobby and not a code of ethics.  “Relax, man.  Nobody even lives there anymore.  No one else will even know.  She sneaks in, takes some worthless trinket, and creeps back out again.  Nobody gets seen, nobody gets hurt.” 

He turned his glittering eyes back on her. 

“Assuming she even makes it past the front door,” he added.

“Unbelievable,” Mason said, his head in his hands.

Their other friend shifted, the first motion he had made since the conversation started, and everyone turned to look as though startled that he was still there and hadn’t simply faded away into the background.

“It’s a waste of time,” he murmured, his voice a quiet rumble of thunder in the dead air of the night.  “It doesn’t prove anything.”

“Oh come on, Sam, it proves plenty,” said Gates.  “It proves my point, in fact, that the only reason she’s so skeptical is because she’s afraid of the truth.”

“I’m not afraid of _anything_ ,” Tex said, her smile not dropping for a moment.

“We don’t know the truth,” said Sam flatly, as if she hadn’t spoken.

“Don’t forget what happened to the last person who went up there,” Mason added.  “That’s part of your little ghost story, too, Gates.”

“I hardly think car accidents are contagious,” Gates said, rolling his eyes.

“I was talking about getting arrested,” Mason insisted.

“It’s likely that was because of the attempted arson and not the trespassing,” Sam pointed out.  “It’s unfortunate, but easily avoided.”

“So all I have to do is _not_ set anything on fire?” Tex repeated, amused.  “Well, I can restrain myself just this once.  Like I said, easy money.”

“I can tell you’ve never seen the place,” said Gates, leaning back, but he looked begrudgingly impressed that she showed no hesitation.  In fact, uncertainty was beginning to creep into his expression, like he was realizing she might actually do it, just stroll into a haunted house, pocket a bauble, and steal away, leaving him a hundred dollars poorer.  Her grin widened.  She loved it when people underestimated her.  It was always fun to watch them recognize their mistake.

“But you know what?” he said slyly.  “Maybe you’re right, maybe it is too easy.  So why don’t we make it more interesting?  Unless you don’t think you can handle it.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Mason muttered, but both of them ignored him.  Gates was too focused on saving face, and Tex’s attention was all on the asshole who had just called her a coward.

“How so?” she asked, perfectly willing to up the ante if it meant showing up the bastard.

“Well, Sam here’s got a point.  We really don’t know for sure what went on in that creepy old shack.  And since you think it’s all so simple, I’ll give you, say, one month to find out exactly what happened up there.  If you can give me and the curious masses on campus an _actual_ answer, I’ll give you _another_ hundred bucks.  But if you can’t you lose the whole bet and… well, let’s just say you’ll owe me a favor.”

A hush fell over the room again as they waited to see what she would do.  Mason had clearly given up trying to talk sense into them, familiar enough with the bullheadedness of his own friends even if he didn’t know Tex all that well, and Sam was only barely interested, but Gates was watching her carefully.  His eyes were as sharp and biting as his smile, eager and keen.

Tex wasn’t stupid, she knew what he was doing; a bet that open-ended was far too easy for him to wriggle out of, and it could mean any number of terrible things if she lost.  It was reckless to take a bet like that, dangerous even.

But the look on his face was the self-satisfied smirk of an asshole who thought he’d won, and Tex?

Tex never backed down from a challenge.

“Oh is that all?” she said darkly.  “You’re on.”

He blinked in surprise.

“I’ll find you your answer,” she went on.  “It’s not like this is ancient history.  It can’t be that difficult.”

“And if it _is_ a ghost?” he asked, maybe still trying to scare her, but it wasn’t going to work.

“You know, I’m kind of starting to hope that it is,” she replied, and with some surprise she realized that it was true.  “I’d really like to show you and your ghosts _exactly_ what I’m made of.”

It was foolish, it was reckless, it may even have been dangerous, but it also sounded like more fun than she’d had in ages, and his expression as she cracked her knuckles and grinned would warm her icy heart on dark and sleepless nights for years to come.

Thanks to the bet, there would be a lot of them.

 

*

 

In the sober light of day the bet didn’t seem more daunting, exactly, but it was starting to look like it would take more work than she had expected.  Tex took some pride in the fact that when she did things she did them right—no unnecessary frills, just results by any means possible.  Do the task, answer the question, knock a few heads together if she had to.  That was how she operated, and academia had been a bit of a frustrating arena for her in that respect.  It seemed like it was all conflicting opinions and run-arounds, learning to spin four pages worth of fact into ten pages of bullshit.  If she had learned one thing, however, it was that in order to get answers, she had to ask the right questions.

Examine the facts.

After a year of embellished stories and straight out tall tales, this is what she knew for sure about the States: two years ago six friends moved into a house in the woods and of that six none of them left under their own power. 

If she was going to find out the truth, that was a good place to start.

“Alright,” she muttered, cracking open her laptop.  “Let’s see what we can find.”

A brief internet search revealed that the facts weren’t at all unclear when it came to the bare bones of the matter.  The final casualty list was one dead, two committed, one comatose or catatonic, and two injured.  Everyone seemed to agree on the statistics.  It was the details that were a bit murky, which was odd, considering just how much media coverage the case received.  It looked like the town newspaper had latched onto the sensational story with an almost inappropriate amount of glee, and there was a solid two weeks of headlines related to the incident.

_Police Recover Footage of Grisly Church House Murder_ , ran one.  It was dated October 2nd, 2007, barely a full day after the incident.  The article said that there was video of what occurred in the house, cameras set up by some unscrupulous conman by the name of Aiden Price, but no one seemed to be sure what he’d been doing there, or what exactly was on the tapes.  The police had apparently kept a lid on the actual recordings, and all the press knew was that they held enough evidence to absolve everyone left of wrongdoing.  Price himself had gone to prison for violating privacy laws, ostensibly the reason the police refused to release the footage, and was still serving out his sentence.

Tex frowned, and kept digging.

The timeline of the events was actually the most interesting thing she found.  The stories all implied that everything happened in one night, a sudden and devastating surprise that blindsided everyone involved, but it wasn’t that simple.  The attacks seemed to be spread out over a week, starting with the assault that ended in involuntary commitment and cost York his left eye, escalating with the attempted suicide of one David Washington, and then culminating, only two days later, in rampage and murder.

It was pretty strange, she had to admit, that so many people would lose their grip on sanity so quickly.  It was almost like something in that house was driving them to hurt each other.  A gas leak maybe, or some sort of mold in the walls that affected the brain. 

Or a ghost, whispered the back of her mind, and she shook her head despairingly at her own imagination and pressed on.

Then there was the matter of the car accident.

The attempted arson and subsequent death en route to the trial was a matter of record, the label “accident” pasted across the wreckage with surprising haste and little scrutiny.  Afterwards the victim’s roommate, another member of the States little group, had simply vanished; on a list of witnesses one day and gone from town the next.  It was all very suspicious, and it painted an unlucky, uneasy picture.  The idea of a curse was still fucking stupid, but suddenly Tex could see why the campus had latched onto it.

Tex sat back, tapping her fingers against the cheap plywood of her standard dormitory desk as she tried to think.  Tragedy, accidents, and murder were all the elements of a mystery novel, and they needed no embellishment to make a decent urban legend.  So what had tipped the scales on this mystery and sent it spiraling into horror?

Because the one thing no one seemed quite sure of was how the idea of _ghosts_ got involved.

The media hyped the murder, brought up as many details as they could scrounge up, and talked in terms of slasher movies and Halloween, but they had never brought in the supernatural.  No one had, and yet it was there, oozing through every crack of a mystery that never seemed to break.

It was easy enough to say that the house was haunted – it was an old building in the woods, isolated, ancient – but all the damage to these people had been caused by human beings.  Yet the story persisted; there was a ghost that walked the halls of the old Church House, lonely, angry, and if you stood in the yard at just the right time of day you could see him out of the corner of your eye, watching you from between the boarded up slats of a half-broken window.  He waited there for his next victims, and this time there would be no survivors.

Campfire dramatics at their best, Tex thought, snorting.  Still, there was something about it that bothered her.  The whole story was fascinating, the ghost bleeding into an already unique murder mystery, and it would be an obvious case of the public imagination getting carried away with itself if not for one thing.  The survivors, or at least the ones still considered sane, never directly refuted it.

Tex closed her laptop, scowling.  She had never been terribly patient, and at heart was more of a smash and destroy sort of gal than a puzzle-solver, but when something bothered her, nagged at her like a hangnail, she would pick at it until it bled.  Besides, her little bet may have been ill-advised, but now her pride was on the line, and she was going to win no matter what it took.

She stood, grabbing her jacket and keys, and made for the door.

Fortunately for her, she knew who might have the answers.

 

 

 

Tracking him down was the easy part.

“Allison,” he said in mild surprise, looking up at her from behind the teacher’s desk in the criminology lecture hall.  He was known for haunting the area on certain afternoons, making himself available to students who needed help, or advice, or just a chat.  The desk was covered with scattered papers, some stacked haphazardly, others slipping loose, and only a third of them covered with the gold markings of York’s signature grading pen.  As he moved one of the papers shifted, making a bid for freedom, but she caught it before it hit the floor, putting it back on top of the pile with an amused huff.

“Rough day?” she asked, inspecting the stacks of work and setting her hip against the desk.

“Nah, I’ve just got a little headache, that’s all,” York replied, tapping the blunt end of his pen against one of the tests.  “Professor Doyle wanted all of these graded by tomorrow, though, so I can’t talk for too long.”

“Aw, no time for your favorite student?” she asked cheekily. 

York chuckled.

“I don’t know if I’d go as far as _favorite_ ,” he said.  “And last time I checked you’re not actually in any of my classes this semester.”

She had to give him that one.

“Fair enough,” she said.  “Then how about a curious friend?”

York eyed her, his gaze mismatched cracked crystal and flawless milk white.  Ocular prosthetics were usually made to match the remaining eye, but he’d told her once that if the scars that snaked across his face were going to give him away anyway he figured he might as well go all out.  Most people found it unnerving, it turned out, and it was actually a pretty good rubric for who would stick with the program.  Students who couldn’t stand the creepy eyes of one TA probably weren’t going to get far in a field as gruesome as theirs could be.  Tex had always found it fascinating, personally, but she had gotten to know York well enough to be familiar with how friendly he was.  Although, to be fair, he wasn’t looking all that friendly now.

“That depends on what this is about,” he said warily.  “If this is about the house—” he started.

“Why would you think that?” she interrupted in genuine surprise.

“This time of year it’s pretty much the only reason people ever come to talk,” York sighed.  “But go ahead, tell me what it _is_ about.”

Tex paused, and then shrugged.

“Well, since you brought it up—” she said breezily.  York groaned.

“Allison—”

“You know, if you actually told everyone what happened out there maybe they’d leave it alone,” Tex pointed out.  “All they really care about is the mystery.”

“It wouldn’t matter, and you know it,” York said with a snort.  “People will think what they want to, they don’t want my opinion.  Besides, I’m unreliable, remember?  Turns out major head injuries aren’t great for your memory.”

“You could still weigh in,” she insisted.  “Tell us the real story.  Or, you know, at least tell people it wasn’t a _ghost_.”

York shook his head slowly.

“I don’t know why everyone is so obsessed with this,” he sighed, but he refused to meet her gaze, looking instead at the stack of papers in front of him.

Tex narrowed her eyes.

“I don’t know why you aren’t,” she said slowly.  She looked at him for a moment, the tired line of his shoulders and the turn of his frown.  “You really don’t remember that night, do you?”

York didn’t say anything, but his frown twisted deeper, and he started fiddling with his pen, still wouldn’t look at her.

This might be more complicated than Tex had expected.

“Well shit,” she said.  “If I were you I think I’d at least be curious.  Everyone’s got scattered details on what happened to you and your friends but nobody seems to have any idea what caused it.  Don’t you want to know _why_?”

“Sure,” York allowed, and the pen stopped spinning in his fingers, his grip visibly tightening, “but I’m more interested in moving on with my life.”

“It would be nice if everyone had that chance, wouldn’t it?” Tex said, and she knew it was a low blow, but she was determined. “How’s Washington doing?  He and that Wyoming guy still locked up in Dymphna’s?”

“Allison…” he warned.

“I’m just saying,” she said.  “The fastest way to find a way to help them is to find out what made them go nuts in the first place.”

“They didn’t _go nuts_ ,” York protested.  “Whatever was in that house—”

He stopped abruptly, and Tex couldn’t believe her ears.

“You mean the ghost?” Tex said skeptically.  York looked at her for a long, tense moment and then slumped, finally giving in.

“Ghosts,” he corrected quietly, and she felt a chill tingle down her spine.  She had never heard him sound so serious.  “If there were any there was more than one.”

“If?” she repeated, latching on to the word.

York shrugged.

“Look,” he said, “all I can tell you is what happened to _me_.  Carolina doesn’t talk about it and no one… no one else made it out intact.”

“You didn’t exactly make it out whole, either,” she said pointedly, nodding towards his false eye.  York brought a hand up, rubbing at his temple over the still vicious-looking scars. 

“I came out better than most,” he said.  “But a ghost didn’t do this.”

“No, Wyoming did that, right?  And do you think he was in his right mind when he did or does the insanity plea hold water?”

“No one was in their right mind in that house,” York said darkly.  “But everyone saw or heard something different.  Carolina barely noticed anything.  Wash complained about nightmares, hearing sobbing.  North… North was the only one who actually saw a ghost.  Said it was a little kid, hiding behind furniture and peeking out at him, only visible in reflections.  Maine had blackouts, missing time for days before he… before it was over.  We never found out what the hell Wyoming thought, just that it made him angry and he blamed it on us.”

“And you?” she asked, and it felt like slipping down the rabbit hole, indulging in wild fantasy only to discover that it was suddenly real and all the more horrifying because of it.  “What did you see?”

“I—nothing,” York said.  “I didn’t see a goddamned thing.  I just felt… watched.  All the time, like there were eyes on me, always, but especially when I was alone.”

“You think it was looking for a weakness?”

“No,” York said immediately.  “It wasn’t like that.  It wasn’t frightening or angry, it was… curious.  No, not curious…” he paused, too long for it to be just thinking, a gap in the conversation that he expected someone else to fill.  After a moment he sighed, rubbing again at the skin around his false eye. 

“Not curious,” he repeated, tiredly, “clinical.  Like it was studying me.”

Tex stared at him.  York wasn’t the most logical person she had ever met but she had thought he was fairly down to earth.  She saw him frequently in her classes, talked with him when she ran into him on campus, and while he could be a little ridiculous at times, almost rakish, she had never known him to be superstitious or easily fooled.  She had never heard him talk like that before, never heard the note of unease and weary, aged anxiety that colored his voice.  He sincerely believed what he was saying.  He really did think the house was haunted, and what was more at some point Tex had started to believe it too.  It was hard not to, when she saw the lines on his face, the jagged scars around his eye, the worried wrinkles that hugged his brow, tugged at the corners of his mouth.

God help her, she was actually starting to think it could be true.

At least that made the second part of the bet a little easier, she thought distantly.  The first half might be another matter altogether.

She needed more information.

“So you don’t think the ghosts wanted to hurt you?” she asked.

“The one I knew?” York shook his head.  “No.  No, I don’t think so.  Honestly it was kind of helpful.  I’d lose things or just be looking for something and then turn around and there it would be, just sitting on my desk where it wasn’t before.”

“But… there were other ghosts in the house that weren’t so nice,” Tex led.

“The Counselor seemed to think so,” York said with a certain amount of bitterness.  “But we don’t really know if anything he told us was true.”

“You mean Price?” Tex asked curiously.  “He was the guy that set up the cameras, right?  What was he even doing there?”

“He was supposed to clear the house for us.  Turned out he just wanted to watch the chaos.”

Silence fell, brittle and hesitant, and Tex watched York fiddle with his pen again before throwing it down with a frustrated sound.

“What do you want, Allison?” he asked, uncanny gaze turned on her with shrewd precision.  “You aren’t the type for chitchat, and I’m pretty sure you don’t believe the stories anyway.  Why are you asking about this?”

“I’m interested in the truth,” she said evasively.  “Urban legends aren’t going to give me that.”

“I don’t think _I_ can help you there, either,” he countered, tilting his head.  “Remember?  If you want the facts then check the newspapers.”

Tex rolled her eyes and didn’t move.

“The newspapers never offered a real explanation,” she said idly.

“What exactly do you expect me to tell you?” he asked skeptically.  “It’s not like we knew what was causing it, even when we were living there.”

“Have you ever gone back?” she asked, and that was answer enough.

York stared at her.

“No,” he said shortly.

“Have you ever wanted to?” she pressed.

He stood abruptly and began gathering the scattered essays.

“I can’t get you into the house,” he said as he moved.  “It isn’t my property and I don’t exactly have a key anymore.”

“Rumor says you used to be a pretty talented locksmith,” she responded casually, watching the way his fingers slipped on the papers.  York stopped to give her another look.

“I’m not going to break in for you,” he said.  “If you want to see the house you’ll have to talk to Carolina, and that’s not exactly something I’d recommend.”

“Oh yeah?” Tex asked.  “Why’s that?”

She hadn’t even thought of trying to track down Carolina; as far as she knew the woman had graduated and never looked back.

“She won’t be easy to get in contact with.  And the last stranger I know of who brought it up got a punch in the face,” York told her flatly.  “She won’t talk to anyone about it, not even her friends.  And you know what?  Somehow I don’t think she would be very friendly to someone who goes around insisting that people call her _Texas_.”

Tex snorted.

“It’s none of her business what I choose to call myself,” she muttered.

“It is when it reminds her of the people she’s lost,” York said quietly.  Tex didn’t have much to say to that, and she simply watched in silence as he shuffled the half-graded papers into something resembling order and packed them away.

“ _You_ could always ask her,” she pointed out after a moment.

York froze for a bare second before he continued, his motions going stiff, and Tex noticed the reaction, wondered what it meant.

“Look,” he said finally, picking up his bag and turning to her with an unusually serious expression.  “Take my advice?  Drop it.  Don’t look into the house and don’t go near it.  In case you haven’t figured this out yet, I’ll spell it out for you: there’s a reason we don’t talk about it.  Let it rot.  It never did anyone any good anyway.  I’ll see you around, Allison.”

Tex scowled as she watched him leave, but didn’t move to stop him.  She knew when pressing an issue was pointless, and it didn’t matter much anyway.  She still wasn’t sold on the ghost story, still believed there could be another answer, but she had to admit that he was convincing.  Something about that place genuinely scared him.

That wasn’t enough for her, though, and it sure as hell wasn’t enough to settle the bet.

Tex looked back at the empty lecture hall, each open seat an absent person, an invisible audience to her failure, and she tried to think of what to do next.  She tapped her fingers against her leg absently.  York might have been the best bet for information, she thought, but he was hardly the only choice.  Carolina might be unwilling to talk or impossible to find, but even she wasn’t the only alternative.  There were others that had been there, too.

They were just a little harder to get in touch with.

 

*

 

The building stood on a hilltop east of town, brick after brick stacked neatly in a four story monument to patience and hard work.  Along the steep, slanted roof was a row of windows, the type that peeked out between the shingles, pointed gables holding semi-circular panes of glass like a hundred shining eyes under raised brows.  The affect wasn’t frightening, exactly, the building tall on the summit and bright in the unobstructed light of day, but it gave the air of impending judgment, a structure so large, so grand in its design that it looked down over their mountain town and always found it wanting.  Window after window lined the walls of the wings that flanked the main hall like a silent guard, and each one seemed turned on the staircase that cut into the hillside, making its way up and up to the massive front door.

It could make a person feel like nothing, walking into that vast shadow.  It could make a person feel like they had something to prove.

Tex eyed the building as it towered over her, never faltering in her step, and opened the huge front door.

Technically it was the Western North Carolina State Hospital, but it was an innocuous title for an impressive institution, and anyone who had lived in the area for more than a month tended to refer to it by its original name, Saint Dymphna’s Asylum for the Insane, or more typically just Dymphna’s.  It had been passing judgment on the town for over a century, all the while employing the immorality and cruelty that had become notorious through the years in the treatment of the mentally ill.  Of course, that was all in the past, they said.  At the moment it had a sterling reputation, the current Director of Psychology and Medicine spearheading new programs and regulations that made it the envy of other psychiatric institutions.

Like every old building with inarguable presence and a dubious history the more superstitious students she knew claimed it was haunted, cursed, a blight on the town, but the truth was that without Dymphna’s there would be no town.  It brought in people, jobs, research grants.  The university that kept the town thriving was famous for its psychology and criminology programs, and that was in no small part due to the asylum on the hill.  In fact, the university had originally been founded near the institution as a training ground for future staff.  Without it there was nothing besides tourism to keep them afloat, and hikers and skiers could only fuel so much of the local economy.  If it weren’t for Dymphna’s their town would have fallen to the fate of so many other mountain hamlets, withering away like leaves in the autumn, vibrant edges turning crisp and brittle as they slowly died.

Dymphna’s was important, and whoever built it anticipated it.  It dominated the skyline of half the town, and the inside was no less grand and imposing than the building’s façade, the large lobby spacious and austere.  The high walls were an almost shining white, the room nearly empty except for the expensive looking desk that drew all the focus to the center, and Tex’s footsteps echoed as she walked towards it.  It was a huge thing, made of dark, expensive wood and holding high-end computers and several phones, folders and a few scattered papers.

There was no one behind it.

Tex frowned, looking at the empty room and finding nothing but somber sensibilities and open air.  There wasn’t even a bell to ring.

“Well, hello there!”

Tex didn’t jump, but she did spin on her heel toward the sudden noise.  There was a man coming through a door on her left, wood and metal drifting shut behind him with a heavy click that spoke of solid barriers and electronic locks.  He was wearing dark blue scrubs over white long-sleeves and a smile that was altogether too friendly for her tastes.

“Sorry about the dead space,” he said cheerfully, walking towards her.  “Phyllis must be in the bathroom.  Usually Sheila’s here to cover for her, but she’s out sick today.  Can I help you with anything?”

“I’m here to visit a patient,” Tex said, as though strolling into mental health hospitals was something she did every day.  She wasn’t going to let the place intimidate her, it was just a heap of bricks and glass and years, and it was possible that it held the answers she was looking for.

“Well, that’s just wonderful, miss,” said the man, crossing behind the desk and tapping at the keys in front of one of the monitors.  “Did you call ahead to schedule a meeting?”

“I didn’t know I had to,” Tex answered honestly.

“Oh, it’s not required, exactly,” he said encouragingly, “it’s just that some of our residents prefer advance notice.  Surprise visitors can be pretty stressful for some people.  Who are you here to see?”

It was about that point that Tex realized that a little planning for this adventure might have been a good idea.  Going to a hospital to visit a patient didn’t seem too hard in theory, but she hadn’t bothered to look up their policies on visitors, and she didn’t know if they only allowed family or let anyone just walk in.  Either way they would probably be a little leery of total strangers coming in to see their residents, and it might be easier to bluff the staff if she actually knew her target’s _name_.

“My cousin,” she lied, thinking fast.  “I think most people around here called him Wyoming.”

The man straightened, raising an eyebrow.

“I didn’t know Reggie had family in the states,” he said, his voice suddenly completely neutral, a jarring change from the almost saccharine tone he’d been using before.  “What did you say your name was?”

“Tex,” she answered automatically, and then realizing how odd it might sound she continued, “and we’re distant cousins, never got to see each other much, but I really looked up to him, you know?  We’re… ah… favorite cousins.  Mr…?”

The word hung loose in the air, an invitation and a distraction, but for a long second she thought he was going to call her on the lie.  She forced herself to stay relaxed, knowing that tensing would just be a dead give-away, knowing that even if she was caught she hadn’t technically done anything wrong yet, couldn’t be arrested for simply walking in and asking questions.  Just wanting to talk to someone wasn’t a crime, even if everything about the room she stood in seemed to be just waiting for her to slip up, to make one wrong move and then pay for it.  He watched her with eyes far more piercing than his demeanor would suggest, and they had a cast to them that made her wonder for a moment just how sharp he could be.

Then the moment passed and the man was smiling again, and if the flash of teeth he gave her seemed somehow cannier, more intense than before, she could always write it off as her imagination spurred by the tension in her body, the echoes in the air.

“Flowers,” he said, and her brow furrowed in confusion before she realized he was offering his name.  “But most people call me Butch.”

“Butch… Flowers,” she repeated slowly, but he seemed entirely sincere.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Tex,” he said cheerfully, leaning down again to tap away at the keyboard for a moment before turning another overly friendly smile her way.  “Well, I’ve got everything cleared away.  You’re entered into the visitor’s logbook.  Technically I’m supposed to leave this up to the receptionists,” he added with a conspiratorial wink, “but it’s been such a long time since Reggie’s had any visitors, what with all of his family living abroad, he could really do with the company, poor fella.”

Tex wasn’t sure if that was meant as a call-out or not, but it didn’t seem to matter.  He came back around the desk and handed her a plastic visitor’s badge on a plain blue lanyard.

“Now let’s get moving,” he said, “I’m sure Reggie will just be thrilled to see his dear cousin.”

He set off across the empty lobby, the sound of his footsteps treading after him like a marching army, and she glanced at the visitor’s badge for a only a second before putting it on and following.  To her surprise he didn’t lead her to the open stairs that wound up to the second floor at the back of the building, but to the left, to the same door he had come from, stopping to wave his badge at the panel next to it, the electronics granting access with a quiet _beep_ and a subtle _hiss-click_.

“Is this your first time?” he asked congenially.

“Excuse me?”

“First time visitors always look a little lost,” he said.  “Don’t worry, the place isn’t as scary as everyone thinks.  The residents here are just people who need a little help, that’s all, and we’re delighted to assist them!  There’s no need to be alarmed.”

He stopped suddenly.

“Oh goodness me, I almost forgot,” he said, snapping his fingers.  “I’m going to have to search you.”

Tex froze. 

“What?” she said sharply.  “Why?”

“Standard procedure,” Flowers replied apologetically.  “Our friend Wyoming is here under the law until he’s deemed fit to stand for his assault trial, so we need to make sure you’re not bringing in any contraband or weapons.”

Tex looked down at her outfit, a form fitting black shirt and jeans topped with a leather jacket, also black, and then raised an eyebrow at him.

“Really?” she asked sardonically.

He smiled.

“Just take your jacket off and turn out your pockets and we’ll be right as rain and ready to run!”

Tex frowned but did as he said, feeling almost naked as the soft leather was taken from her, examined, and handed back.  She hadn’t brought anything illegal into the building, she had no reason to, but that didn’t mean she liked the idea of being treated like a criminal.

“Wonderful!” Flowers said cheerfully.  “And now we’re all ready to go, if you’ll just follow me to the visitor’s room…”

The halls of the building had high ceilings and many windows, doors lining up on the other side as though looking through them.  Flowers led her through the maze of glass almost aimlessly, chatting all the way, only stopping occasionally to nod at the scattered people they met, dressed in scrubs or doctors’ white coats.

“Reggie’s been doing very well recently,” he told her as they walked.  “He hasn’t had an incident in at least two months, we’re all very happy for him.”

They rounded a corner and came face to face with large double doors.  Flowers paused to flash his badge across the lock before pulling them open and waving her inside.

“Now you take a seat wherever you like, I’ll just go get your cousin and the two of you can have a nice little family reunion,” he said, and when she turned to ask how long it would take he was already gone.

Huffing, Tex examined the door.  There was another panel on the inside, and when she tested it she was unsurprised to find that it was locked.  She turned back around, giving the room a critical look.

The visitor’s room held more people than she’d seen anywhere else in the building.  It was surprisingly welcoming, considering the echoing halls and clean walls of the rest of the hospital.  There were sofas and plush chairs, tables with art supplies or puzzles stacked in the corners.  People in uniform, loose-fitting white outfits were scattered around, lounging as they spoke with others dressed in more everyday clothes.  There was a teenaged girl speaking animatedly with an older gentleman who nodded along congenially on the sofa on one wall, while a pair of middle-aged women laughed over a jigsaw puzzle, and a young man dragged crayons across a sheet of paper with great care as an older couple who must be his parents talked, apparently unruffled by his lack of response.  In the corner was a balding man, looking out the window, his gaze following the pointing finger of an elderly woman who spoke softly and trembled when she moved.  Only the few men in scrubs standing around the edges of the room spoke of the careful watch these people were under, the scrutiny that fell on everyone who walked through Dymphna’s doors.

Tex sat down in a folding chair at an empty card table and waited.  The minutes stretched on, and she watched the tableaux of life inside the hospital, its own insular world where the lines were drawn between inside and out, the only comingling allowed under the watchful eye of silent staff in colored scrubs.  It was at least ten minutes before Flowers was back, trailing behind him a man in the patients’ typical white garb that she could only assume to be Wyoming.  He was older than she expected, with dark hair shot through with gray and a moustache that verged on ridiculous.  He moved stiffly, but his eyes were shrewd, and every bit of his attention was focused on her.

“Here we are!” Flowers said cheerfully, actually pulling a seat out for Wyoming, who only nodded to him before sitting.  “Now I have to get going back to the lobby to check on Phyllis—I think she might have caught Sheila’s stomach bug, and we don’t want to leave the front desk unattended for too long, do we?  But there’s always help nearby it you need it,” he added, gesturing vaguely at the colored shadows that lined the walls.  “Have a nice chat, and enjoy your visit!”

Flowers gave Wyoming a pat on the shoulder.

“Thanks, mate,” Wyoming murmured, but the orderly was already gone, the door swinging shut behind him once again with a quiet sound, locking them in.

Tex didn’t watch him go, her eyes still trained on her new acquaintance as silence seemed to surge between them, almost drowning out the chatter of the visitors room and enclosing them in their own isolated space.  Seconds passed with no conversation, only a measuring quiet, until Wyoming leaned back in his seat and spoke.

“Knock, knock,” he said.

“…what?” Tex said blankly.

The man’s moustache tilted up slightly at the corners.

“Knock, knock,” he repeated.

Tex stared at him, but it became clear very quickly that Wyoming was prepared to wait her out, to just sit and stare at her until she answered, obviously in no hurry to go anywhere.  She rolled her eyes.

“Who’s there?” she obliged.

“Elias.”

“Elias who?”

“Elias a terrible thing, my dear,” Wyoming answered, raising an eyebrow at her, “but it seems it can open many doors.”

Tex stared at him.

“Really?” she said finally.  “That’s what you’re going with?”

Wyoming simply shrugged, leaning forward and resting his forearms on the table, clasping his hands and looking down at them instead of her.

“It gets the point across,” he said as he examined his cuticles.  “Imagine my surprise when our friendliest orderly came to inform me that I had an unscheduled visitor.  Apparently, according to him, we are… cousins?”

She gave him a tiny smirk.

“Apparently,” she said nonchalantly.

It was a little hard to tell under the squirrel tail he called facial hair, but she thought he smirked back at her.

“Well then… Texas, was it?” he said, and there was definitely a smirk in his voice, the sardonic tone almost drowning out the curiosity underneath.  “Well then, _dear_ Tex, since I don’t actually recall having ever met you before, would you be so kind as to tell me what brought on your sudden bout of… familial duty?  Not that I mind the company,” he added.  “It’s been quite some time since I had a visitor.  It will be nice to talk to a living, breathing person again.”

Tex raised an eyebrow, unable to let that remark pass, considering the reason for her visit.

“Do you talk to a lot of people who aren’t?” she asked, despite herself.

Wyoming’s moustache tilted again, and underneath she caught a glimpse of teeth.

“Ah,” he said.  “I see.  So that’s why you’re here.”

Tex crossed her arms and leaned back but didn’t say anything.  She was starting to realize that she might be a little out of her depth.  Wyoming was not at all what she had expected, if she had thought that far ahead.  He was older, more astute, and already seemed far more dangerous than she had been prepared for.  His accent was British in such a vague way that it made her wonder if it was real or affected, and then made her wonder why he would bother to fake it.  It was a question she probably shouldn’t bother asking in a place like Dymphna’s, but she was no longer sure that Wyoming was what people claimed.  After what York had told her, his voice tight and troubled, she was no longer one hundred percent sure of anything she had believed about the Church House or its former residents.  The uncertainty irritated her, made her restless, and she wanted answers.  The longer the bet went on the more personal it seemed to become for her, the more she wanted to know what was going on, not for money or even for pride, but because the mystery had gotten to her.

She was hooked.

Wyoming was watching her with dark eyes.  There was something in his posture, in his expression, that seemed wound, coiled tightly like a spring or a snake, ready and waiting.  It didn’t look like insanity, she thought, eyeing him in return.  He didn’t act like a person drifting in his own mind, unmoored from reality.  To her it looked more like the opposite, like the face of a man whose eyes had been forced open and never allowed to close again, not even to blink or to sleep.

He looked like a man who knew too much.

Tex didn’t shiver.  She was far too tense, and she wasn’t afraid.  Keep moving, she thought, keep going.  Don’t let them see you are unsure.  It was always her strategy in these kinds of situations, and it had never failed her before.

“You’re not the first to ask, you know,” Wyoming said.  “They slip in from time to time, the curious, the morbid…” his voice pitched lower, but she didn’t give in to the temptation to lean in, to bring herself closer, “…the spiritualists.”

He broke eye contact with her then, scanning the room as he spoke, his voice low but steady, unruffled, unafraid, as though the things he said were not at all unusual or uncanny, as though it were everyday life and he had grown bored of it.  Maybe he had.

“Your kind always asks the wrong questions,” he said almost idly.  “ _Do you hear voices_ is hardly a useful metric in a place like this, even accounting for illness.  It’s the walls and the ceilings, you know.  The height of the place, the breadth and open spaces.  It’s in the acoustics, the materials, brick and mortar and beam.  We can always hear voices here.  The building is an echo chamber of whispers and murmurs; they travel, they last.  It’s really no wonder that people claim the place is haunted.  Even the doctors hear voices inside these walls.”

He looked back to her.

“Of course, their sanity may also be up for debate,” he said, and once again she caught a flash of teeth.  “ _Do you hear voices_ ,” he said again, with a slight chuckle.  “Yes, of course.  Try again.”

Tex stared at him, almost spellbound by his cadence.

“What do they say?” she found herself asking.

His eyes seemed to glitter.

“Much better,” he said.  “But not good enough.  It’s hardly an interesting conversation, you see, when they always say the same things.  _Let me out.  Let me out.  Make it stop.  It hurts.  Be quiet.  Be still.  Hide._ ”

He leaned forward.

“ _Run,_ ” he said, and around them the susurrus of chatter seemed to ripple, the indecipherable murmur of other conversations twisting in her ears until the word seemed to echo across the room, returned from every angle.  _Run, run, run runRUN…!_

Tex shook her head sharply and scowled when Wyoming laughed, his eyes still dark and sharp.

“Aren’t there supposed to be drugs to help with that crap?” she asked sourly.  Across from her he leaned back in his seat and made a sound that could only be described as _harrumph._

“Major tranquilizers and sedatives,” he grumbled, unimpressed.  “And they hardly work.  The voices never leave this place, my dear Tex, they wander through the building until they reach a dead end and then they fall silent, but they will always return.  They travel in cycles, loops in time and conversations, like recordings played over and over to an audience forced captive.  Being too tired to move, too listless to care, doesn’t prevent that from happening, it just prevents us from responding to it.”

He shook his head.

“Besides,” he added, still in a conversational tone, as though nothing he had just said was out of the ordinary or alarming at all, “our dear saintly institution doesn’t believe in over-medicating their residents, especially if it is ineffective.  The Director is far more invested in the effects of long-term… therapy.”

The whole monologue was unsettling but it was that pause that made her stop and wonder.  Wyoming watched her carefully from across the table as her eyes narrowed and the silence settled between them, the murmur of other voices fading back into a steady pulse around them like the rhythm of the ocean or the ticking of a clock as it counted down the hour, marching ever onward to some inevitable conclusion.  There was something in the way he spoke that made her think of riddles, words that hid their own meaning by burying the truth in the obvious.

“These voices you hear,” she said slowly, “are you telling me they’re ghosts or are you saying that they’re… real people?”

The moustache titled into a smirk again.

“Knock, knock,” he said.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she muttered.  “Fine.  Who’s there?”

“Cook,” he said.

“Cook who?”

Wyoming grinned at her.

“That’s what they call me,” he said.

She could have strangled him.  Unfortunately she didn’t think the lurking security would look too kindly on her if she leapt over the table at him, so instead she forced herself to take a deep breath through her nose and unclench her fingers from where they had started to bite at the leather of her jacket.

He had been locked away in his so-called echo chamber on the hill for two years, she reminded herself, with few enough visitors that he would accept the company of a total stranger out of curiosity rather than take the safer route and send her packing.  He was clearly enjoying their little back and forth, the drama and mystery she was allowing him to spew, and he knew very well that she had no choice but to listen if she wanted to ask her questions.  He was clearly very clever.  He was clearly very bored.

In short, she realized, he was probably just fucking with her.

The thought was like breathing fresh air after being pinned for too long in a crowded room.  In some ways she could actually appreciate it; if someone came asking her stupid questions she might do the same if she was bored enough.  That didn’t mean she was going to let him keep doing it, though.

“Very funny,” she said flatly.  “You got me.”

Wyoming continued to smile, dark eyes over sharp teeth, and didn’t respond.

“That’s actually not why I’m here, though,” she went on.  “I really couldn’t care less if you think this place is haunted, or if other people think you’re crazy.”

“Oh no?” he said, and he actually sounded disappointed.  “Do tell, then, why _are_ you here?”

“Because, _Wyoming_ , I want to know why—”

“Here they are!” said a cheerful voice from directly behind her, a hand falling on her right shoulder and cutting her off mid-sentence.  Tex recognized the voice as the overly friendly orderly who had brought her in, and she was not pleased to discover that his grip, like his voice, was a little too warm and somehow uncomfortably intimate.  She didn’t turn to look, however, unwilling to let Wyoming out of her sight even though he had shifted his gaze to stare at the person behind her, his eyes going wide and then narrow, the corners of his moustache dipping down.

“Well, I see you two are having a friendly conversation,” Flowers said.  “I’m glad there was no need for concern after all.  I’m sorry to have made you rush over for no reason, my friend!”

“Don’t worry about it, Florida.”

Tex couldn’t stop herself from turning then, because she recognized that voice as well.

“ _York?_ ”

“ _Allison_ ,” York replied from just behind Flowers, and his tone wasn’t exactly friendly, but she was too surprised to really care.

“What the fuck?” she demanded.  “Are you following me?  How the hell did you even know I was here?”

“Florida called me,” he said, and Flowers waved with his free hand, neither his smile nor his grip slipping in the slightest.

“Wait, Florida?” she repeated with some suspicion, giving the orderly a closer look.  “You’re one of the States?”

“My, what a fun nickname,” he replied.  “And of course!  Aren’t you?  I haven’t really been keeping up with campus for the past few years, I’m afraid.”

“When you introduced yourself as Texas he thought you might be a friend of mine,” York said.  “Not a lot of other people around here go by state names, we have something of a reputation in case you didn’t notice.  Apparently you _lying_ to get in here was kind of a red flag, so he called to ask if I knew anything.”

“Now, now, miss,” Flowers, apparently Florida, said chidingly.  “There’s really no need for deception, we’re all friends here!”

“Are we?” she said skeptically.  “So what, you’re telling me you would have let me in anyway?”

“Well gracious, I don’t see why not,” Florida replied.  “As long as Reggie was okay with it.  It’s not as if he didn’t know you weren’t a relative.  Our policies aren’t _that_ strict, and he has been awfully lonely here.”

In her peripheral she could still see Wyoming, a white shape hovering just on the edge of her vision.  He hadn’t moved since the interruption, hadn’t spoken, and somewhere in her subconscious she registered that sudden stillness as strange.

“Jesus, Allison, you really have no shame, do you?” York said, and it didn’t even sound angry anymore, just tired and maybe a little bit impressed.

“Not when it comes to things I want,” Tex answered.  “Or want to know.”

“If this is still about the house, I don’t know what you think you’re going to learn from coming here,” York told her.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Wyoming tense, but she was too focused on the conversation to really take note.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” she said.

“Wyoming wasn’t even there for most of it.  They locked him up after _this_ , remember?” York said, gesturing at his own face, at his own scars.  Across the table Wyoming began to tremble.

“He was in the house,” she pointed out.  “He might know something.”

“He doesn’t know what happened that night,” York countered.  “I doubt he even knows what happened right before he was dragged away.  He sure as hell doesn’t know anything that _I_ couldn’t tell you.”

“Alright, maybe we should all calm down,” said Florida, his hand on her shoulder tightening.  His voice was controlled but his eyes were not on them.

The table was shaking.

“You don’t know that,” Tex replied.

“Allison, I asked you to drop this,” York said.  “You’ve got to have something better to do with your time.  Go back to school, go to a party or do your homework—”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like being told what to do,” she hissed at him.  “You don’t have any say in where I go in my free time, York.  This isn’t up to you.”

“York, my friend—”

“If you have any respect for other people—”

A crash filled the room, careening off the walls and leaving silence in its wake, and they turned, startled.

Wyoming had lurched from his seat, the folding chair falling to the ground behind him like punctuation, bringing everything to a halt.  He stood, shaking, bristling, his fists clenched and his eyes fixed on York.

“Saboteur,” he growled lowly.  “You talk about respect?  After what you’ve done?  _How dare you_.  You ruined me!”

With each sentence his voice rose in the sudden silence until the growl was a roar, furious and uncontained.

“You did this to me!” he bellowed.  “You put me here with your lies and your _lock picks_ , and now they’ll never let me go!  You did this!”

He lunged.

Tex sprang out of her chair, the cheap metal skidding away as she refused to remain seated in the face of the man’s sudden wrath.  But he wasn’t interested in her.  There was wild rage in his eyes as he rounded the table, faster than he had any right to be, charging forward with hands outstretched, fingers hooked like claws and teeth bared and he moved past her, straight for York.

She couldn’t stop him.

There was a split second where her blood turned to ice, and the only thing running through her mind was that York was one of the few people she knew who still smiled at her, that he was one of the few people she considered a friend, that he had followed her there, followed her there to stop her or to help her or to do whatever he thought was right, because that was York’s goal in most things.  It was usually York’s goal to do what he could to make things right, even if he wasn’t always sure how, because behind his cutting jokes and occasional sarcasm, behind the teasing and the deflection, that was all he wanted.  It was something he wore on his sleeve, pinned there by his own sharp wit, hiding in plain sight.

She had one moment to remember that he was only there because of her.

Then it was over.

“ _You put me here,_ ” Wyoming shouted from the floor, writhing, Florida’s knee pinning the small of his back as he wrestled back his hands, half a dozen more orderlies rushing in from all corners of the room.  “ _Let me out.  Let me out!  LET ME OUT._ ”

The rest of the staff were quickly shepherding the other residents and visitors out of the room, one of the doors held open so they could evacuate the nervous group with as little fuss as possible into the hallway while their colleagues dealt with the incident.  Tex followed them, not stopping to look back at the group on the floor of the visitor’s room, not stopping to listen to the yells or the abrupt way they ceased.

She only stopped to offer York a hand up from where he had fallen.

“Sorry,” she said, pulling him to his feet.

“Thanks,” he muttered.  “My balance isn’t what it used to be.”

The followed the others, the last ones out, and stopped in front of the doors as they closed, locking automatically behind them.

Tex took a deep breath.

“Shit,” she said, fairly succinctly as far as she was concerned.

York ran a hand through his hair and leaned back against the bright white walls of the hallway.

“Two years,” he murmured.  “Two years and he’s still…”  He glanced around at emptying hall, “…well.  Here.”

“He told me he heard voices,” Tex said, watching her friend carefully, looking for any sign of injury but finding nothing.  It seemed like he really had just lost his balance trying to back away when he was attacked.  She refused to sigh in relief.  “I couldn’t tell if he meant people in the building or hallucinations or… ghosts.”

“Ghosts,” York repeated, shaking his head.  “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

Tex didn’t answer him.

“You know old movies and shit always say that when you’ve had an experience with the paranormal it makes you more receptive to having another,” York told her, tipping his head back until it bumped against the wall and he was looking straight up.  “Hell, maybe the place _is_ haunted.”

“Maybe it isn’t,” Tex said, tearing her eyes away from him and looking instead out of one of the many windows, at the town stretched out below them, open and vulnerable.

“Or maybe it’s just full of stressed out people and the mentally ill, and that’s all the explanation we need,” he went on.

“Maybe it isn’t,” Tex repeated, and when she looked back she caught his eye.

A pause sat heavy between them.

“So that’s it?” York asked finally.  “Are you satisfied now?”

“Are you kidding?” Tex asked with a light laugh.  “I might be coming around to your ghost theory but that still doesn’t give us any real answers.  I didn’t even get a chance to ask him about the house.”

“Well there’s no one left to talk to,” he sighed, “so I guess you don’t have much choice.”

“You know that isn’t true,” Tex said.  “There’s still another person here who lived in the house with you.”

York stared at her for a moment.

“Wait,” he said.  “You can’t be serious.”

“Washington—”

“Has enough problems without you rehashing the worst week of his life,” York interrupted.

“You don’t want to visit him?”

“I—”

“Oh that’s not really possible, anyway,” interrupted a now familiar voice.

Startled, they turned to see Florida coming out of the visitor’s room, his face once again all smiles and sunshine and Tex would have found it hard to believe that he’d just tackled someone bodily to the floor and subdued them if she hadn’t seen him do it with her own eyes.  He was alone, standing in front of the door as it locked again behind him, hiding whatever went on inside from view.

“What?” York asked, clearly surprised.

Florida shrugged and then shook his head sadly, but somehow he never lost that smile, which was frankly beginning to grate on Tex’s nerves.

“It’s very unfortunate, but our old friend Washington isn’t allowed visitors,” he said.  “He’s still very disturbed.  The Director has taken on his case personally, out of respect for his daughter’s friends, you know, but he doesn’t think Wash is ready yet to see anyone.  Now,” he continued before they could question him further, clapping lightly as though he were a kindergarten teacher addressing his class, “we’ve had an eventful afternoon and the visitor’s room will have to be closed for just a bit, so I’ll take you guys back to the exit, alright?  Follow me, please.”

They did, not a word passing between them, but York’s mouth was set in a grim line, and Tex never let Florida leave her line of sight until they were outside again, the echoes of his cheerful goodbyes fading as the massive doors swept shut with barely a whisper.  Standing there in silence on the doorstep of the asylum, Tex couldn’t help but feel like they had somehow made an escape, even though they had simply walked out unhindered.  It was ridiculous, she told herself, just dramatics brought on by the tension of the afternoon.  It was just a building, just a structure of glass and wood, brick and mortar, silence and echoes.

She shook her head with a light snort, and headed for the stairs.  She was done here.  Back to square one.

“Allison, wait.”

Tex stopped on the first step, and turned.  York hadn’t moved, still standing in front of the doors wearing a frown that looked carved into him, but when she made an inquisitive noise, he looked at her, and something in his face had changed.

“I’ll take you to the house,” he said.

She stared at him.

“Any particular reason why the change of heart?” she asked in surprise.

He didn’t answer her immediately, looking back again at the doors of the institution for a moment and saying something under his breath that she only barely heard.

“Let it in or let it go,” he muttered to himself.  “Shit.  There was never really a choice for either of us, was there?”

“York?”

York turned back to her and then exhaled, frustration exploding out of him in one tight, controlled breath.

 “Because you were right,” he said, “okay?  I _do_ want to know.  I want to find out what the fuck happened to us out there and _why_.  But more than that… I want this to end.  And if the only clues to making it stop are in that goddamned house, then… great.  I’ll go.  Just tell me when.”

“This Saturday,” Tex said immediately. 

York gave her an incredulous look.

“Halloween,” he said, bringing a hand up to rub at his temple.  “Of course.  You would.”

“What, too scared?” she said lightly, and smirked when it made him laugh, even if it was unsteady.

“You know what?  Sure.  If we’re gonna go, I guess we should go big,” he said, finally moving forward until he was right next to her.  “I’m in.  But not after dark.  I’ll meet you in the criminology lecture hall after lunch.  One thirty.”

Tex nodded.

“Thanks, York,” she said, and she meant it.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he replied, taking the first step and starting down, and clearly he did too.

 

*

 

“What, no Carolina?” was the first thing she asked when she saw him again on Saturday afternoon.  The lecture hall was once again empty except for York, sitting on the edge of the teacher’s desk and grading a few stray papers while he waited for her.  She could admit that she hadn’t exactly rushed over, the idea of spending an evening in a haunted house piquing her interest more and more now that she was starting to believe in the possibility, and a _lot_ more than the idea of spending a quiet afternoon there.  Dawdling wasn’t her style, exactly, but it was possible that she had sauntered instead of walked.  It was possible that she was more than an hour late.  When she saw the raised eyebrow he gave her when she walked in, she had to throw something at him as a distraction.  “I thought you said she was the only one who had a key to the old place?”

York pulled his things together and pulled out his car keys before patting his other pocket.

“And I thought the rumors said I used to be a decent locksmith,” he replied.  “Come on, my car’s in the parking lot right outside.”

“You’re driving?” she asked, following him out.

“Do you know where it is?”

“…you know, now that I think about it the rumors never really specified.” 

“That’s pretty inconsiderate of them.”

“I should complain.”

“Don’t know how much good it would do,” York said, starting the car once Tex was inside, and Tex noticed that he seemed different from the last time they talked, lighter somehow, more like the man she had come to know in the past year.  It was as though finally deciding to do something, having a plan of action, had lifted a weight from him.  After hearing about the house from the giggling and superstitious students all month, she couldn’t blame him if he was itching for something to do.

Not that they were doing much of anything at the moment.

“How far away is this place, again?” Tex asked fifteen minutes later as they left the last scattered evidence of town, meandering down a lonely road boxed in by trees, the turns too sharp to be called lazy but still forcing them to travel slower than she liked.

“Forty-five minutes from campus,” York answered, not looking away from the road even for a moment.

Tex leaned back in her seat, watching the forest pass by and trying to resist the urge to put her boots up on the dashboard, since he was doing her a favor and all.

“Well, since we’re going to be here all day,” she huffed.  “Care to tell me why we’re breaking in and not just asking for permission?”

“I told you,” he said, but something about it sounded stiff.  “Carolina’s not easy to get in touch with.”

“What,” Tex scoffed, “she doesn’t answer her phone?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Tex glanced over at him, just in time to see his grip tighten on the steering wheel.

“Okay, I feel like I’m missing a big part of the story here,” she said, after a moment of consideration, the silence so solid she thought that even ten more minutes might suffocate her.  “You don’t have to tell me, obviously, but it kinda sounds like you need to talk to _someone_.  And, you know, we are about to go storm a haunted castle together, so information might be a good thing to start sharing.  Just putting that out there.”

York huffed a laugh.

“Yeah, maybe,” he relented.  “I don’t know what good me spilling my guts is supposed to do, though.”

“Well, try it and see,” she suggested.  “Can’t hurt to have someone to talk to, York.  Dealing with this shit can’t have been easy, and it’s not like I’m going to get all judgmental on your ass.  I mean, you can’t even really guarantee that I’m listening.  I get bored _very_ easily, buddy.”

He did look at her then, a split second flicker of his good eye in her direction, and she promptly turned back to stare out the window, choosing dramatics over decorum and shifting her left foot to rest on the glove box.  There was silence in the car for several long, incredibly dull minutes, Tex just counting the trees as they crept past, counting the miles as they moved over them, counting the seconds as they crawled.  She was about to start talking again just for something to do, but York beat her to it.

“Ah, what the hell,” he muttered.  “Why not.  It’s not like I can afford actual therapy.”

He lapsed into silence again, but it didn’t last.

“You know not a lot of people ask about what happened after,” he started, and she thought he might have glanced at her again, but she made no move to check.  “It’s like a goddamned novel to them.  You finish the last page, close the book and it’s over.  The end.”

He laughed.

“That’s not how it works.  But nobody asks about how long it takes for a concussion to heal, or a broken leg.  Nobody cares about the nightmares and the fucking problems that come with the fact that pretty much every one of your friends is in some kind of hospital or… worse.  No one wonders about the police asking for things you can’t give them, what people say to you when you tell them something _impossible_ , or what you had to do after the damn crime scene was cleared.

“I never went back, you know?  I told you that.  I never went back.  That’s because I was still trying to get my head back on straight when Carolina took care of it.  She walked out of the hospital on her crutches and went back to that fucking house, alone or—or hell, maybe she was with the Director, I don’t know.  They took care of it.  They moved out all our shit, cleaned up… the rest, and we never looked back.  No one did.  No one else had to.  That was just the kind of thing she did.”

Silence fell again in the car, and Tex didn’t look around.

“We moved into an apartment as soon as we both could, but… I don’t know,” he went on.  “I just… I don’t know.  I didn’t know what to do, I guess.  I tried, we both did, but…  After shit like that happens sometimes things change.  Sometimes they have to.  Sometimes the one person you wanted to spend your life with just can’t stand to look at you anymore, doesn’t even want to be in the same room at night.  I tried.  We both did.  But I guess I… it wasn’t enough.”

The leather of the steering wheel creaked as they went around another turn, just a little too fast.

“After Halloween, after the arrests, she said she needed a break.  I mean, I’d hardly seen her for like a week, anyway, so, you know.  She moved out.  Back to the dorms.  Her old roommate from freshman year had a double single, I bet that’s something that never makes the stories but it damn well should,” he laughed, and Tex wouldn’t comment on the way the sound wavered.  “Always kept the same room, but drove her assigned roommates away.  Four years in school and Carolina was the only one who ever managed to stick that girl out.  She was practically a legend.  _The bitch in 479_ ,” he said dramatically, “but don’t tell her I said that, Niner would deck me, bad eye or not.”

Again he fell silent, and Tex had to resist the urge to shift and break the reverie.

“I went to see Maine once,” he said suddenly.  “Not long after the funeral.  He was… it wasn’t really his fault, you know?  He didn’t…  It didn’t really matter, though.  Turns out coma patients aren’t that chatty.  I tried to see Wash, too, but… well, you heard what Florida said the other day.  They always said he wasn’t well enough to see visitors and eventually I… fuck.  I didn’t know it was still that bad.”

Tex didn’t ask about Wyoming.

“I never did know what to say to her, I guess,” York said quietly.  “Not before and not after.  I couldn’t get her to leave and then I couldn’t get her to stay.  Then CT died and…”

He trailed off, the quiet stretching out again and filling the car until it was suffocating, and Tex had to look back, had to move somehow or be smothered by it.

“CT…” Tex said, trying to bring him at least a little bit back from whatever morass his thoughts had sunk into.  “She’s the one that tried to burn the place down, right?”

They took another sharp turn.

“Yeah, sure,” York said.  “That’s what they say.”

“What, you disagree?” Tex asked, surprised.  That part of the story had always been vague, a footnote after the tragedy, and it rarely varied in execution.

York didn’t answer immediately, frowning as he stared out over the steering wheel.

“It just… it wasn’t like her,” he finally said.  “Even _I_ knew that, and I never really talked to her all that much.  Anyone who knew CT knew that she was a journalist, a—an investigator.  She liked to stick her nose into other people’s business, sure, weed out secrets and that sort of shit, but she also liked to play her cards close to the chest.  She didn’t talk about the things she knew until she was _sure_.  Journalistic integrity, I guess.”

“So?”

“ _So_ , she was patient.  She was a planner.  She was the one who was looking for answers, getting into the history, and I think she might have found something.  She just hadn’t told us yet.  Burning down someone’s house in a fit of rage or grief or whatever the cops said?”  York shook his head.  “Not her style.  But… taking the fall for someone she cared about until she had some way to get them both off the hook…”

Tex straightened up.

“You really think she didn’t do it?” she asked.  “You think, what, that she was framed?”

York shrugged.

“All I’m saying is that CT was good at finding secrets, and she was the one the Director threw the book at.  They arrested CT, but everyone knew that _South_ was the hothead, and she was a real wreck after North… after what happened.  He was always the one who had to pull her back from the edge of doing stupid shit, you know?  He had a lot of practice at it.  After he was gone… fuck, CT never stood a chance.”

Tex stared at him.

“Well, shit,” she said.  “You know, if I were you I probably would have punched her in the face.”

York turned onto an almost hidden road, the sign nearly lost behind a huge rhododendron, the words _Bottle Tree Lane_ barely visible through the glossy evergreen leaves.  The car bumped and rattled as the pavement seemed to splinter under it, the poor condition of the road jostling them through the silence.

“South took off after CT died,” York said as they lurched their way forward.  “And you know what?  I didn’t exactly go looking for her.”

“And Carolina?” Tex asked.

“Carolina enlisted the day after she graduated.”

Tex blinked in surprise.

“Carolina’s a soldier?”

“A marine,” he corrected with a tiny, sad smile that Tex would never question.

“You really lost everything to this place, didn’t you?” she murmured, and she didn’t really mean for him to hear her, didn’t even know why she said it, but he answered.

“Not everything,” he said.  “Carolina’s still out there.  She’ll come home eventually, and then we’ll… we can work it out.  If we can—” he stopped, paused, and started again.  “We just need some time.”

Tex looked at him, at the hope that creased the lines in his face, at his grip on the wheel, and she didn’t say anything.  She turned her gaze back to the trees and watched them judder by as silence fell in the car, interrupted only by the skittering crunch of wheels rolling over cracked pavement as it became gravel, and they moved onward.

 

 

 

The house stood exactly as pictured in the news articles, a tall, old building in a clearing on the mountainside, surrounded by a scraggly, overgrown lawn that pushed back bent and twisted trees.  At first glance it was a great gray shadow, stark against the clouds of an overcast, dreary day, a paper cutout silhouette that caught the eye and held it fast.  Only after long examination, squinting at that dark shape as the wind blew the seconds by, did details begin to show through, the sharp edges of shingles, the curve of the eaves, the twists and turns of elaborate molding around the windows.  The building was two floors but looked taller, the steep, slanted roof suggesting concealed spaces, another story hidden beneath the iron cresting that guarded the roofline, reaching towards the sky in sharp spikes like weapons brandished against the heavens.  Even the windows were thin panes of glass that stretched up farther than expected, long teeth in an unfriendly smile. 

It was shaped like a horseshoe, a small central courtyard covered in scattered gravel surrounded on three sides by high walls, the roof of the small porch almost lost in the shadows.  On the second floor of the western wing was a small balcony overlooking the front lawn, decorative iron railings standing watch for whatever visitors might come knocking.  The eastern wing was a tower, bay windows rising up and up on both floors until they met the downward sweeping edge of the roof, in which was nestled a great round window.

The window was broken.  That was the first thing about the house that Tex really noticed as she stepped out of the car, her eyes drawn upward as though to meet the gaze of the looming structure.  It was set in the tower roof, surrounded by molding and standing out against the slate colored shingles, looking down on the yard and the driveway as though watching those who came and went.  The glass was shattered near the top of the pane, and instead of replacing it someone had simply boarded it up, creating a heavy lid to the eye of the house, making it look almost weary.

She didn’t see anyone inside.  Not that she expected to.  She was just making sure.

Slamming the car doors shut, the sound loud in the isolated mountain clearing, the two of them made their way from the huge, bare tree York had parked under, and up towards the house.

It looked like something out of a black and white horror film, she thought as they approached, but there was something there that pictures or even film would never be able to capture or recreate.  The air felt hushed and still, a pause before a breath, a breath before a scream, waiting for the slightest provocation to release it, and when it did, when the wind moved in a sudden burst around them, it raked through the lifeless branches of empty trees with a sound like ice cracking, like bones rattling.  It was bleak, and cold, and dead, and it worked its way inside her with freezing fingers.

Standing there at the doorstep of the old Church House, suddenly Tex understood just why everyone was so willing to believe in ghosts.  If there was anywhere the dead would linger, it was there, in those dark walls.

“Kinda grim, isn’t it?” she said to break the silence.  The trees shivered in the cold of the last breath of October, and she pulled her jacket closer for warmth.  “You’re telling me you guys moved in to this place and you _didn’t_ expect it to be haunted?”

York actually laughed.

“You know, I’m pretty sure everyone but Carolina made that joke, actually,” he said.  “Wash even called it the _Psycho_ house.”

“Well it doesn’t sound like he was too far off,” she said, thinking of knives in the dark, and murder, and tumbling down the stairs, cast down by the last person you expected.

“He could be pretty astute when he tried,” York snorted as they walked through the courtyard, his shoes crunching over the gravel, her boots grinding it into the dirt.  “But none of us thought we were quite that on the money, at least at first.  We didn’t expect it to be _real_.  Besides, the place isn’t all that bad.  You’ll understand when you see the inside.”

Tex followed him up the creaking front steps, looking down at the flaking paint.  Light blue, like clean streams or clear sky, it curled and peeled away from the wood in tiny bumps like waves in the ocean.  It seemed like a strange choice on a house so relentlessly grayscale, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what it might mean.

“Well, shit,” she heard York say, and turned her attention back to her partner in crime, who was examining the tall double doors with a frown.

“What’s the problem?”

“Nothing, really, just…” he gestured to the doorknob, shining bright against the dark wood, “the locks are new.  I probably should have expected that, the EMTs had to break the door down to get us out, so of course it would need repairs, but… this is top of the line.”

“For a house out in the woods?” she said skeptically.

“We’re trying to break in, aren’t we?” he retorted.  “The Director’s a paranoid son of a bitch, but he has good taste in hardware, I’ll give him that.”

“Okay, but can you crack it?” she asked.

“What is this, a heist?” he said.  “Of course I can, I’m awesome at this shit, okay?  But it might take a bit longer, that’s all.”

“How _much_ longer?” she asked, looking back to the clouds and the dingy gray tint that seemed to have faded into the air.  There was no sun to judge the time by, no shadows stretching towards them, the light not even strong enough to indicate the east or west as the sun moved behind the clouds and the trees.

“Uh… we’ll see?” he said.  She rolled her eyes.  “Not _that_ much longer,” he said quickly.  “Just a few minutes, tops.”

“Better get started,” she told him pointedly, and he shrugged, pulled a case of lock picks out of his jacket pocket, and went to work.

It took more than a few minutes.

Standing out on the porch in the cold watching him grumble and swear at the door wasn’t exactly exciting, and York wasn’t a sparkling conversationalist when his most in-depth response to her was “uh-huh… aw, fuck.”  After about ten minutes Tex was bored out of her skull.  She tried to peek into the windows in the doors, but they were ornate cut glass things, the kind that scattered light and made anything on the other side look vague and deformed.  All she could see was that it was dark inside, and that was hardly illuminating.

Five more minutes passed, and Tex decided to go exploring.

Leaving York to his frustrated mumbling, she stepped off the porch and made her way back across the courtyard and into the wind.  It was chilly away from the sheltering wings of the house, the air biting with every breeze, but she just pulled her jacket tighter and moved on.  After a moment of deliberation she chose left, and walked to the eastern wing of the house, the tower looming over her as she skirted around it, the edges of dark windows that lined its first floor shining even in the diffuse afternoon sun like wires glinting in the underbrush.  She eyed them thoughtfully, and kept walking.

Rounding the eastern wall of the house she discovered an unkempt garden.  What would be wild and untamed in the spring, lush green plants spreading with no regard for the guidance of human hands, had become scraggly and half dead in the crisp air of the deepening autumn.  A few plants here and there hung on to the last sliver of green in their stems, but most of them had turned brown and brittle, dry under her boots as she made her way through.  There were French doors leading back into the house from what she guessed must be the kitchen garden, the house still and murky on the other side of fragile glass. 

She tried the handle, just in case, but it was locked.

It had been at least half an hour since their arrival, and as far as she knew York was still working.

Tex stepped back into the garden, into a bed of wild, tangled weeds, dead wildflowers that had taken over the ground close to the wall, and crouched to pick up a large stone.  She considered the French doors, hefting the rock to feel its weight, solid and frigid in her fingers.  It might not be an elegant solution, but she was tired of waiting, and she could always tell York it was broken when she found it.  He was probably too preoccupied to notice the noise anyway.

Moving to stand back up, she stopped suddenly, her eye catching on a glint in the dirt, under where the rock had rested.

It was a key.

Tex dropped the rock and picked up the sliver of metal.  It was an old, rusted thing, and looked like it had sat there in the mud for at least fifteen years.  There was no way it would fit the new locks on the front door, and she was about to toss it back down when she paused.

She hadn’t found it by the front door.

Tex looked back at the French doors.  Standing, she used her fingers to clean the key of the crusted mud and pushed it into the lock.  With a tiny _click_ it turned, and the door slid ajar.

“Looks like I’m not so bad a locksmith myself,” she laughed to herself, slipping the key into her pocket.  “York will be so proud.”

As tempting as it was to just go inside and let York in by the front door, she resisted the urge and made her way back around the house, to where her friend was still kneeling on the painted porch, quietly swearing at the indifferent doorknob.

“York,” she said.

“Wait, no, that’s… hang on, just a few more—I’ve got this, okay?” he said.

“I found a key,” she announced.  “Side door’s open.”

York stopped.

“You found a _key?_ ” he said incredulously, swiveling on his heel to gape at her.  “ _Where?_ ”

“In a flower bed under a rock,” she said nonchalantly.

He stared at her, his mouth half open for a second before he shook his head and huffed.

“I don’t even know why I’m surprised,” he said, standing up and brushing off his jeans.  “I swear, it’s like the house likes to fuck with me.  And I’m not even going to ask what you were doing picking up rocks.”

“You know me too well,” she grinned.

When they reached the French doors, cracked open and waiting, he stopped her just as she reached out to push it open.

“Don’t be disappointed if we don’t find anything interesting,” he said.

“Are you kidding?” she responded, her hand itching where it lay on the handle.

York shrugged.

“We lived here for weeks before anyone saw anything,” he pointed out.  “We don’t know how it works.  And…”

“And what?”

York paused, an almost glazed look fading into his good eye as he looked through the glass to the gloomy interior.

“One of the things I _do_ remember,” he said quietly.  “One of the only things I remember.  About that night.  It was… Lying in the dark, and Carolina saying to me, over and over at the end, over and over, ‘it’s gone, it’s gone.  We’re safe, it’s gone.’”

Tex stared at him.

“Jesus fuck,” she said.  “If the ghosts are _gone_ then why the hell do you try so hard to keep people away from the place?”

For a second York didn’t answer, still lost in his own fragmented memories, but then he shook his head, moved past her, and pushed open the door.

“She’d been wrong before,” he murmured, and stepped inside.

 

 

 

Inside the house was not at all what Tex had expected.  She followed York across an unlit dining room filled with a perfectly serviceable table and chairs, glancing at the open kitchen on their right and the stools tucked neatly against an empty breakfast bar.  On her left was a closed door, probably to the room that occupied the first floor of the tower.  All in all it was a tidy space, cozy even, not too big or too close, and only the layer of dust that had begun to settle on each surface was there to remind her that it was no one’s home.

York ignored the room entirely, walking instead to the open archway and the dim space beyond, lit only by the meager sunlight that filtered through tall windows over the door.  As he left the dining room the cadence of his footsteps changed, the soft creak of his tread amplifying, soaring, the sound bouncing back in soft echoes a half second later, as though he had been joined by an invisible companion.  He turned to the wall, stopping on the other side of the archway and the footsteps followed suit.

“Come on,” he said.  “Let’s get this over with.”

He flipped a switch, and above them a chandelier flickered to life, casting a soft glow over the room and a shimmer on the dust in the air.

“Okay,” she said.  The room was huge and open, the double front doors on her left and a staircase making its way up the wall to her right to the second floor.  A railed balcony looked down on them, doors crowding the walls as though standing back from the edge.  The chandelier hung from a distant, vaulted ceiling, and with every word she spoke she wondered how many would be thrown back like a taunt.  “So what are we looking at?”

“The foyer,” York said innocently, and Tex snorted.

“Thanks, genius,” she said, checking the impulse to shove him only because she was standing on his blind side.  “I _know_.  I meant, what happened where, what should we be looking for?”

“Oh,” York frowned.  “Hell if I know.  Most of the action went down here, or in the hall upstairs, I guess.  As for what we’re looking for…”

He hesitated, just a split second of obvious indecision, not quite long enough to comment on, but noticeable all the same.  In the end York just shrugged.

“I can take you to my old room,” he said, starting off across the foyer, his footsteps following like a faithful pet.  “There was definitely a ghost in there at some point.  He liked to watch me study.”

“Sounds like a real nerd,” she said, watching as he skirted the room, avoiding the middle and hugging the outer wall.  That section of the floor didn’t look any different to her, no break in the pattern of the intricate parquet, no scaring or stains, and she saw no reason to avoid it.  She wasn’t in the house just because of York and his hang-ups, she reminded herself as she strode through the room with confidence.  She wasn’t even there for a bet, anymore.  At some point it had become more than that.  It wasn’t just to prove that she wasn’t afraid of anything, that she could _do_ anything if she felt like it.  She was also there to weed out the truth, to find answers that no one else was brave enough to look for.  She wasn’t going to balk at an innocuous stretch of floor.

“Yeah, I always got that impression,” York was saying when she hit dead center.

She stopped.

It wasn’t a chill, or a shiver, or any change in temperature that halted her.  It wasn’t anything so ominous, just something she saw on the wood panels below the stairs, unobtrusive, barely noticeable.  She didn’t even really know why it caught her eye, but once she saw it she couldn’t seem to look away.

It was a black line on the wall, like a split in the wood.

Curiously, Tex made her way over to it.  At first she thought it was a stain or a mark, but as she approached she realized that it was a gap between the panels, darkness lying thick between the slats.  There was a knothole in the wall by the crack, just above waist height, a divot in the wood that she could fit her fingers into just so, and pull away.

The wall under the stairs opened up before her, and stale air rushed out, dry and cold, like ancient fingers threading through her hair.  Tex coughed in the disturbed dust and squinted into the darkness, so dense that it felt like reality fell away on the other side of that door, a cavern sinking into the depths of the world.  There was emptiness there, welling up below her, and the darkness seemed to seep from it and into the foyer, as though it could not be contained.  It almost seemed to stain the floorboards at her feet, and as she peered inside there was a niggling thought, a curiosity, that told her there was something down there, something she was looking for, hidden in that black space.

She leaned in.

Beyond that door it was lightless and cool, and the air shifted and rustled against things she couldn’t see.  It was there, in that dark, in the subtle whisper of moving air, the quiet grumble of creaking steps.  Something inside her ached and itched, and purred in response.  It was everything she wanted; truth, and power, and answers, all waiting for her.  She had come into the house to prove herself, and here was her chance.  All she needed to do was take it.  All she needed to do was move.

Tex narrowed her eyes and stepped forward, her foot landing on the first step down.

“Allison?”

York’s voice jolted her, and when she turned she found a frown on his face, his hand on her arm.  She hadn’t even felt it.

“What are you doing?” he asked in confusion.

She gestured to the open door and the barely visible stairs leading down.

“Exploring,” she said.  “Obviously.”

York glanced at the dark stairwell as well and then snorted.

“Don’t bother,” he said.  He pulled her back, and she grunted, a flash of irritation hitting her.  She yanked her arm out of his grip, and he held his hands back in surrender, but didn’t concede the point.  He gestured at the gaping door.  “It’s just the basement.  Believe it or not, in the cliché that this place is, nothing ever managed to happen in the basement.  The light’s just burned out.  That’s about as dramatic as it gets down there, unless you find laundry to be particularly spooky.”

“How exciting.”

He shrugged.

“Not everything is ghosts and ghouls in this place,” he told her.  He shifted, stepping back and glancing away.  “I went back to my old room.  There were these photographs I found in the desk in there, I thought they might be a clue or something, but I forgot that I gave them to Carolina.  Nothing else interesting in there, really.  Whole room just feels kind of flat now, you know?  The desk lamp doesn’t even turn on anymore.”

For some reason he sounded disproportionately disappointed by that.

Tex huffed.

“Well if there’s nothing in there, and nothing down _there_ , then where do we go next?” she asked.  “There has to be _something_ in this house worth looking at.  We’re here to find answers, remember?”

_We’re here for more than that,_ she thought, and at her back the cool air rustled.  She stepped forward and kicked the basement door shut, not hard enough to crack the wood, but with enough force that it shook as it connected with the panels, bouncing off the latch.

“If it were that easy we would have figured it out back then,” York pointed out, but he wasn’t looking at her, his gaze wandering up, past the stairs, to the second floor of the east wing, and his expression was tense.  “But… there is still the attic.”

Tex frowned.

“What’s in the attic?” she asked.  The stories never mentioned anything actually happening up there, more focused on action and consequences than the setting, and she had always thought that the ghost in the attic was put there by the storytellers because that’s where superstitious people thought ghosts belonged.  Then she remembered the broken window, boarded up but not fixed, staring down at her from the height of the tower.

“I don’t know,” York admitted.  “We never managed to get it open.”

That sounded promising.

“Lead the way, then,” Tex said, and followed him up the stairs, leaving the foyer behind them without a second glance, not even for the cracked basement door.

“The door’s in this linen closet,” said York as they reached the top landing.  “It was nailed shut when I found it but I—what the hell.”

He stopped short, staring across the hall.

Tex whistled.

“That looks mighty fancy,” she said.  “I’m guessing by your incredibly poised reaction that it wasn’t there before?”

York glared at the large, complicated looking lock on the closet door.

“Definitely not,” he grumbled.  “Why the fuck would you lock up a linen closet?”

“Why the fuck would you nail an attic door shut?” she countered.

He paused.

“Because there’s something inside you don’t want anyone to find,” he surmised.

“Yup,” she agreed. 

They both stared at the lock for a moment. 

“Do I have to ask?” she said.

York huffed and pulled out his tools again, kneeling down to examine it.

“Holy shit,” he breathed after a few seconds.  “Look at this thing, it’s _beautiful_.”

Tex left him to it.

The tiny tinkering sounds of his work faded as she walked through the balcony hallway, drowned out by the heavy fall of her footsteps as they rebounded through the air.  She eyed the distant, vaulted ceiling as she moved, one hand slipping idly across the railing as she left York behind and wandered deeper into the house.  The second floor was an open balcony that looked down on the foyer from three sides, and each opposing wall was lined with doors, shut fast.  The light of the chandelier infused every corner with a soft glow, leaving no shadows for monsters to hide in, and the hallway seemed empty and lifeless.

York was crouched in front of a door on the east side, so Tex went left, towards the west, trying doorknobs as she went.  She was almost surprised to find the first unlocked, the door in the northeast corner swinging wide with barely a sound.  She took a few steps inside, but found nothing remarkable.  It was a large bedroom, sparsely furnished with the necessities and little else.  There were no signs of inhabitance, no knick-knacks or stray items.  The bed was made with precision, sheets and blankets pulled tight and layered with a fine coating of dust.  There was nothing exciting inside, only dim gray light streaming through windows as the day drifted on and afternoon sank towards twilight, the mountain stretching up in the distance behind the glass, and the creak of the house in the wind.  She stopped for a moment to listen, for the whisper of the wind or perhaps for something more, but she heard nothing but the normal aches and pains of an ancient house standing strong against the stiff mountain breeze.

She shut the door, and moved on.

The rooms of the house were all the same.  They were cold, dim, and soulless, emptied of anything personal or interesting, void of even the slightest evidence that anything had happened there at all.  She found the bathroom and another bedroom, a linen closet with bare shelves, and none of it offered any sort of story.  Wandering the halls of the house was like traveling through an abandoned movie set, the actors and props already removed and the walls just waiting to be torn down.  Out of boredom she checked each room, but there was never anything there, nothing to see or to learn. 

Frustrated, Tex walked into the master bedroom, barren of anything but furniture, and made her way past the huge bed, past the nightstand and the dresser with the old tarnished mirror, to the balcony door.  Stepping outside, she breathed in the fresh air even as it stung at her face.  The view was beautiful, if bleak this time of year, the slope of the mountain giving way to reveal the skeletal treetops of the Blue Ridge.  The wind was still strong, a force with teeth, and she didn’t touch the iron railing, knowing that it too would be freezing under her bare fingers.

She shoved her hands into her pockets.

“What a waste of time,” she muttered.

She didn’t know what she had expected, but her excursion had turned out to be less a test of courage than of patience.

Tex turned with a disgruntled sigh, leaning back against the decorative railing, which complained under her weight, a grating squeak that was almost insulting.  She didn’t know why she was so disappointed.  After everything she had heard about the place, everything she had said, she should feel vindicated to discover that it was just as normal and boring as she had always declared.  She shouldn’t feel let down by the promise of ghosts, by the thrill of danger and mystery.  She shouldn’t be wishing there was something more to uncover.  The place was a little creepy and people were easily duped by their own imagination.  Case closed.  She had been right all along.

But she didn’t feel like she had won.

Looking back at the house, her eyes roamed over the floor of the tiny balcony, over the black streaks she could just barely make out in the wood.  They were scorch marks, she realized, and she leaned down to swipe a finger over them, rubbing at the trail of ash it left on her skin.  Behind her, the wind blew in a sudden stinging gust, and she shivered, standing to pull her jacket tighter around herself.

There was nothing else to see, so Tex went back inside, closing the door tight behind her.  The cold seemed to follow her in, back through to the hallway of echoes and emptiness, but she paid it no mind.  She knew that certain kinds of bitter cold could cling to the clothes and the skin, seep into the mind.  It didn’t mean anything.

She skirted the balcony as she made her way back to York, looking down at the foyer below.  It looked darker than before, she noticed vaguely, the glow of the chandelier not quite reaching to the distant parquet, the designs blurring in the lower light.  Twilight was approaching, she thought, the sunlight sinking behind the trees in the west, behind the mountain itself, and leaching light from the ground floor as it went.  They had been there far longer than they had planned already, too many locked doors eating at their time, and twilight always came early in the mountains, the sun blocked by ridges and trees, darkness pooling in the hollows and valleys.  That was all it was, she thought, but her eyes stayed on the front door, on the gloom below, far longer than they should.

“Any progress?” she asked York when she reached him, finally looking away.

“Progress,” York repeated, not even glancing at her.  “Plenty.  Tons.  This shit is easy, what did I tell y—oh goddamn it.”

He glared at the lock.

“Whoever designed this bastard should be thrown off a skyscraper,” he growled, starting again.

“What I’m hearing is that we’re going to be spending the night,” she surmised.

“I almost have this asshole figured out, just give—what?  No, just—hang on a minute…”

York trailed off into grumbling and vague curses, and somehow she didn’t think he was going to answer her again.  Unfortunately, that didn’t leave her with much to do.  She glanced around the hallway, almost desperate for a distraction of any kind, and she spotted one last door, at the end of the western hall.  It had to be the tower bedroom. 

Tex shrugged and walked over, York off in another world full of locks and puzzles.  None of the other rooms had been particularly interesting, but she was running out of options, at least on the second floor, and she had already seen half of the first.  She reached out and turned the doorknob.

It stuck.

Tex frowned and jiggled the handle.  Absurdly, she had the strangest urge to knock, but she brushed it aside and simply tried again.  For a moment it held fast, stiff in her hand and unwilling to turn, but after a quiet swear and a more vicious twist, it gave in, the knob turning smoothly and the door opening without a sound.

“Trick or treat,” she muttered with a huff.

She didn’t hesitate to step inside.

On the surface it was just a room, like all the others.  There was a bed, a nightstand, a dresser.  A closet door hung slightly ajar on the inside wall.  On the far side tall, bay windows faced south, a window seat fitting comfortably into the space, gray-blue light shining dully through the glass to illuminate the flat cushions.  It was spacious, like all of the rooms in the house, and empty of human artifacts.

Tex’s breath ghosted into the air, and she watched it drift and disappear.

She smiled.

The room was markedly colder than the others.  It made no sense for a second floor bedroom facing south, and for the first time since she had come upstairs she felt a thrill tingle down her spine.  Maybe the house wasn’t so empty after all, she thought, leaving the door behind her cracked open and venturing further in.  There was something there, vague and undefined but trickling into the atmosphere, like the last scents of autumn, sharp and bitter with just a hint of decay.  It filled the air with a chill, miserable and cold, the first edge of winter in an isolated room.

Something was different, and she was determined to find the cause.  She started with the closet, looking for skeletons but finding it empty and entirely uninteresting, and moved to check the other corners of the room.  The bed was made, crisp and clean like all the others, and when she looked she found nothing underneath, not even dust bunnies.  Feeling a little silly for checking, as though there would ever be a monster under the bed, she stood, eyeing the dresser and wondering if it would be worth it to riffle through the drawers.  When she moved toward it, however, turning away from the bed, her hip bumped the night stand and she stopped short when she heard something rattle.  Curiously, she turned back to it.

It was an uncomplicated thing, basically just a single drawer with legs, and Tex had barely noticed it before.  The drawer stuck just a bit when she tried to slide it open, as though it had been pushed in at an odd angle by someone in a rush, and she had to ease it out, pulling it slowly and carefully until she could see what was inside.

It was a lighter, an old zippo that shone a soft blue even through years of rust and dirt.

“Huh,” Tex hummed, picking it up and turning it over.  There was no design, just a metallic sheen in a light sky blue.  The bottom read E on one side of the logo and VII on the other, and she ran a finger over the symbols for a moment before the meaning clicked.  It was the manufacture date, punched into the bottom in code like on every lighter the company made.

“May,” she murmured, pulling the specifics from the depths of her memory, “1992.”

She opened it, but was unsurprised to find that it didn’t work.  The lighter was over fifteen years old and judging by the traces of mud had clearly been abandoned somewhere before finding its way inside the house.  The real question was how it got there, why it was still there when every other item had been methodically removed.  In the long run, however, it didn’t really matter.  It provided a date, it gave her a starting point. 

She was supposed to bring something back, Tex remembered, running her thumb over the cold metal.  She turned, her eyes falling on the dresser again, but she didn’t bother to search it.  There would be nothing there, she knew suddenly, just as there was nothing anywhere else in the house.  It was empty, and lifeless, and hopeless, and she was wasting her time.  The pointlessness of a wasted afternoon hung heavy in the room, a bitter taste in the air that mingled with the cold, a miasma of defeat.  She had found nothing, changed nothing by coming there, and it was a worthless adventure, even if she did win her little bet.

Tex turned to leave, crossing the room back to the door and shoving the old lighter into her jacket pocket as she did.  She had made it all the way back, her boots thudding heavily on the wood and her breath still misting in the air, when she stopped.  With her hand on the doorknob she froze, every muscle going taut, even her breath stilling in her chest, unwilling to move lest it break the sudden tension in the air.

There was someone behind her.

She didn’t know how she knew, what subtle pressure changed in the room that made her pause and lock up.  She couldn’t explain the knowledge, the certainty, but she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she was not alone.  Standing there, stock-still and breathless, she listened, strained for some small sign or proof, and for a long moment she didn’t dare to move, only her hand tightening soundlessly around the doorknob as she eyed the sliver of golden light that spilled through the crack in the door and disrupted the thin blue twilight like an intrusion, like an escape.

She took a breath.

She shut the door.

The sound didn’t echo, didn’t move the way it would in the open hallways of the huge house, only a quiet whisper and a soft click as she trapped herself inside.  Long seconds passed and nothing happened, and Tex stood in the murky light, tense, listening.  At first there was nothing at all, just the quiet of an empty room and the strange feeling of presence, that creeping paranoia murmuring to turn around, to cast a glance over her shoulder just in case.  The wind beat against the house, which shifted and creaked in complaint, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, not a single sound that could explain the way her skin had begun to prickle.

Then she heard it.  It started behind her, barely audible over the noise of the breeze outside as it rattled the windows and then faded away, revealing the tiny sound, a hitch in breath, a hiccup, a hushed sob.  In the quiet in the wake of the wind she could hear more clearly.  In fact, as every second crawled by it seemed to become louder, nearer, wandering on an aimless path, creeping close and then fading away, back to the far corners of the room, to the empty benches of the window seat.

The cry was soft, and sad, and hopeless, a strangled breath too wet with tears to be a proper sob, too choked to be anything more than a broken whisper in the air.  It was lonely, it was wretched.

It was real.

Tex slowly relaxed her grip on the doorknob and turned to look behind her.  She saw nothing, but the sound was still there, rising and falling on a wave of despair, and she could almost feel it move through the air.  She steeled herself against it, her eyes roaming the room, and refused to let it bother her.  The ghost was there, somewhere in the room with her, on the edges of hearing and sight, and it hadn’t noticed her yet, too preoccupied with its own misery.  The ghost was real, proof of the paranormal, and she wouldn’t be swayed to sympathy by that sound, not when it had the knowledge she wanted. 

Step one, she thought, make contact.  And as always, when you are out of your depth, do not let them know.

She took another breath, the cold air a shock to her lungs, a reminder that this was reality, and raised her chin.

“Alright, cockbite,” she said, sure and strong and not a single inch of her shaking.  “Listen up because I don’t like repeating myself.  I hear you’ve tried to hurt people in the past, tried to scare them, so I want you to know: I’m not afraid of you.”

Her voice fell into total silence.  The noise had stopped, she realized, the hitching sobs halted by her brash proclamation.  Even the air had gone still, like the whole room was holding its breath.  She suppressed a shiver and spun slowly, examining every corner as she did and finding nothing even as the weight of eyes pressed down on her and trailed icy fingers up her spine.  Whatever was in the room, it was watching her now.

At the end of her turn she found herself facing the door, and she told herself she was pleased to find it was still shut.

“I don’t care if you’re a ghost,” she announced, eyeing the door with forced indifference.  “I don’t care that you’re dead, and I sure as fuck don’t care that you’re _sad_.  The only thing I care about is _why_.  Why are you here?”

Her words seemed to hang in the dead air of the room, the bravado in them turned brittle by the rising chill.  The moment crystalized like ice as the temperature dropped, the seconds trapped and frozen while she stood there, motionless, and waited for it to shatter.

With her heart pounding in her ears she almost didn’t hear it when the broken, jagged sounds of breathing began again, only clear to her when she realized abruptly that it was right behind her, so close that she could almost feel the damp exhale on her ear.  It wasn’t a sob, she thought with sudden clarity, her eyes going wide.  It wasn’t a sob at all, too wet and too choked, the gasping desperate and strangled, drifting across the hairs rising on the back of her neck.

Tex whirled, stumbling backwards, one step, two, towards the door, unable to stop herself from staring.

There in front of the bay windows was a figure, outlined in the light of falling twilight, indistinct and ethereal.  The rays of fading, dreary daylight shone through him like a faint blue halo, washing him out with a deathly pallor.  His expression was pained and angry, and his plain, unremarkable clothes glistened with something wet.  At first she stared in blank incomprehension at the gray-blue visage, but when realization dawned color flooded in and then all she could see was red.  Red, red everywhere, red seeping into his collar under his throat, oozing down his arms, and dripping from his hand as it stretched out towards her, reaching, grasping.

Her skin crawled and her body shook, screaming at her to bolt, and involuntarily she took another step backwards, stumbling into the wall by the door with a muffled thump.

Automatically she glanced at it, still firmly closed, the back of her mind screaming that she was trapped, shut in with no escape, that she was trapped but she had to leave, she had to get out, get out _get out,_ and then she whipped her head back around, unwilling to take her eyes off of the apparition for more than a single second.

It was a good thing she looked.  If she had given into the flight instinct her body was pushing, the irritating voice in her brain that told her to bolt out the door, if she followed the urge to run and run and not look back, then she never would have noticed. 

His expression had changed.  There was a new cast to his eyes, a faint but obvious tilt to his lips.

The dead bastard was _smirking_ at her.

She stared at him in dawning incredulity, a scowl twisting across her face as the near panic vanished in the face of this obvious offense. 

“You _asshole_ ,” she hissed with, she had to admit, a certain amount of begrudging admiration.  No one had gotten her that good in a very long time.  Without hesitation she pushed off the wall, took one long stride towards him, and smirked back.

“I am _not afraid of you_ ,” she declared.

“Not afraid of what?”

Startled, Tex jumped, turning to see York silhouetted in the now open door.  His expression was wary as he looked at her, but not alarmed, and when she turned back around she was not surprised to see the room empty, the strange shimmering light gone with no evidence that it had ever been.

“I thought I heard something,” York said, still eyeing her.  He pushed the door open wider and gestured for her to follow him out.  “You alright?”

Tex looked at him and made a snap decision.

She didn’t want to leave yet, and she had a feeling she knew what would happen if she told him what she’d seen.

“Peachy,” Tex said, giving the room one last look.  It was empty now, of both presence and feeling, just a room with dusty corners and stale air.  There was nothing left to see, but still she hesitated.

“Come on,” York said, but he didn’t come further in to get her, waiting instead until she slowly left the room and then closing the door firmly.  “You shouldn’t go in there,” he said quietly.  “Wash… that was Wash’s room.”

Tex glanced back at the shut door, thinking of strangled grief and insidious despair that had blanketed the room like cold fog, and it no longer seemed strange to her that Washington had ended up in Dymphna’s if he had lived in that room, if he had slept there night after night with those sounds stealing into his dreams.  It was no wonder that he was still there.

It was one mystery solved, if nothing else, she thought numbly.

Her gaze lingered on the door even as she followed her friend back through the hall.

“Ta-da,” York said, presenting the open closet with a slight flourish, and she turned her attention back to their goal, back to the other puzzles of the house, about to be solved.  “See?  What did I tell you, I’m a practically a pro.”

“And it only took you half the day,” she said, patting him on the shoulder.

“Hey, it wasn’t that long,” he grumbled, but she caught him looking over his shoulder, towards the windows over the front door and the fading gray on the other side.  The sunlight that petered in had hardly been blinding, the weather all day had been clouded and gloomy, but it was also distinctly dimmer than before.  Tex wasn’t sure what time it was, but they were running out of daylight, and after what she had just seen she was no longer sure that being in the house after dark on Halloween was such a clever idea.

She wasn’t afraid, but she also wasn’t stupid.

“Alright then, let’s see what’s behind the mystery door,” she said, moving past him and peering into the small closet.

It was dark inside, but not unnaturally so, just a burnt out light, the dangling chain only offering a sad clicking sound when she gave it an experimental tug.  Shelves lined one side, turning what would have been a fairly ordinary closet into a small tunnel, like a secret passage or a tiny panic room.  In the back corner of the right wall was a door, barely visible in the murky light.  Reaching out she tried the doorknob, and although it turned smoothly in her hand when she pulled the door stayed shut, stuck fast, even as she yanked and wrenched at it.

She frowned.

A sudden harsh glow illuminated the wood, and she turned to see York walking into the tight space, his cell phone acting as a flashlight.

“Nailed shut, remember?” he said, holding the phone so that the light glinted off of six large nails, three near the top and three at the bottom, all driven deeply into the wood of the frame and the door at precise angles.  It wasn’t the only thing she saw, however.  As the light moved, shadows fell into gouges in the wood, scoured marks and jagged trails that raked through the grain in the frame.  Frowning, Tex ran her hand over the long scratches, and found that they matched with her fingertips.  Someone had tried to dig their way through the door.

Her hand fell away and she tried not think about how much that would hurt, how desperate you would have to be to even try, or how angry.

“So are we prying this open?” she asked.

York didn’t answer, and she looked back to find him staring into the opposite corner with a puzzled frown.  She followed his gaze but found nothing, just the empty shelf, coated with dust, and she didn’t know why he would find that strange, what he might have expected to be there instead when the entire house seemed void of any signs of life.

“York,” she prompted, and he jumped.

“Oh,” he muttered, and began rummaging through his pockets.  “Yeah, hang on.”

Tex had no idea what he was looking for, if he expected to discover a tiny toolbox or a magic wand stowed away in his sleeve.  While he was searching she continued to yank at the door, bracing one boot against the frame and pulling hard, hoping that with enough force maybe she could loosen the nails enough to pry them out by hand, or maybe just splinter the wood and be done with it.  Each jerk strained the wood as the door moved a fraction of an inch before catching with a soft thud that filled the tiny closet, moved strangely in the space behind the walls.  It sounded like the beating of a heart, of the house itself or some lost soul who had been locked up inside it.  The door rattled and shook under her strength, but even with all of her muscle behind it the wood barely budged in its frame, stubbornly resisting her attempts.

“Got it!” she heard behind her, and she threw a glance over her shoulder to see York holding what appeared to be a tiny crowbar, five inches in length with a  notch at the end for prying loose nails.  He looked a little too pleased with himself, holding the little thing like he should win a prize for bringing it.

“Where do you even find something like that?” she asked in amused surprise.  “Tiny tools dot com?”

“Hey, I have it on very good authority that it’s not the size that matters,” he responded.

“It matters when you’re talking about leverage,” she snorted.

“Okay, maybe, but this is a lot easier to stick in your pocket than a full-sized crowbar, and a lot less conspicuous, too,” he said, moving up to get closer to the door.  She stepped back to give him room, finally letting go of the doorknob.  “Besides,” he went on, “we’re not taking the whole house apart, it’ll still… do the…”

He trailed off, staring at the door, and as his voice faded into the uneven quiet, she realized why.  The rhythmic thud hadn’t stopped when she let go, hadn’t paused when she stopped pulling.  The low sound continued on, steady thumps and tiny creaks, and slowly, wordlessly, their eyes followed it up, to the ceiling.

It was the rhythm of footsteps.

The sound was soft at first, but growing louder, growing nearer.  It moved overhead, passed over, and then turned back, descending towards them behind the wall, behind the door.  The house creaked in the unseen space, the noise a tired staircase makes when burdened with unexpected weight, and they listened, their eyes now pinned to the door as it approached.  It stopped just on the other side, and the silence rang as their gazes fell to the doorknob, waiting to see if it would turn.

The seconds passed like a glacial age, and they watched with baited breath, but nothing happened.  Whatever stood on the other side of the door had stilled, as if the nails that kept them out were a barrier to it as well, holding it at bay.  As long as the attic door stayed shut it would wait there, listening like them for intruders, perhaps.  It would wait for them to move, wait for them to release it.  As long as the attic door was shut, nothing would happen.

Tex pushed forward and grabbed at the tiny crowbar in York’s hand.

“ _Allison,_ ” he hissed at her, startled but refusing to let go of the tool.  “What the hell are you doing?!”

“Opening the damn door,” she whispered back furiously, yanking at it, but his grip was surprisingly strong, white-knuckled around the metal, holding on like it was a lifeline.  “You want to know what’s in the attic, right?  Here’s your chance!”

York gaped at her, and in the silence and the darkness in the tiny space she thought she could hear the beating of his heart, frantic and stumbling.  Then he leaned in, shoving his phone into his pocket and snatching back at the crowbar, not touching her but putting his free hand around the metal on the other side of hers like a bookend. 

“You—are you _out of your mind?_ ” he sputtered.

“York, this is what we came here for,” she fumed, and with a twist and a yank she pulled the little tool out of his hands, forcing him to let go with a tiny yelp and a voiceless curse.  “You might be able to finally find out what the fuck is going on here, and you’re going to a let a little noise scare you away?  Get a grip, it’s just a creaking door, or the wind, or a goddamned squirrel in the attic.”

He stopped nursing his hands for a second and the look that washed over his face was pure incredulity.  Honestly she couldn’t blame him for that; she didn’t actually believe it either.  It didn’t matter, though, not really.  There was something on the other side of that door, something that could finally give her answers, give him closure, and it made her skin tingle with anticipation.  She wasn’t going to waste the opportunity.  She turned on the door, wedging the crowbar under one of the nails, and began to pry it out.

“Shit,” York muttered behind her.  “This is a bad idea.”

The closet was small and cramped, and she could feel the heat of his body behind her, hear his breath as it stuttered.  The light inside remained constant, just the bare illumination that filtered in through the open doorway from the chandelier in the hall, not enough to make out the nails even when she knew where they were, but she didn’t care.  The nail was almost as stubborn as she was, held in place by the inertia of years, rust and age and something more, but she had been aching to do something all day and she was determined to succeed.  Bit by bit she teased it free, inches of iron pulled loose until it fell to the ground with a muted metallic sound and rolled away, into the darkness.

There was a creak from the door, or the space on the other side, like a shift in the wind or a sigh.

Tex went to work on the next one, and the next.

“Allison—”

Just as York spoke up again, just as she began to dig the metal edge under the third nail, there was a soft buzz in the air, almost unheard under their breath and their heartbeats, barely noticeable beneath their hushed argument.  They might not have heard it at all, but with that tiny sound the golden glow of the chandelier in the hall, its light already struggling to reach the narrow closet, flickered and went out.

Darkness fell like a velvet shroud around them, so thick it seemed to muffle every other aspect of reality.  For a moment there was absolute silence, light and sound both vanishing in an instant, and Tex could feel the hairs on her arms stand on end as her skin erupted in goose bumps.

“Jesus Christ,” York breathed, and he seemed closer in the pitch black room, like the walls were closing in, squeezing them tight.  “Was that the fucking wind, too?”

Tex didn’t respond, she just dug the tool deeper into the wood, under the nail she knew was there.  She didn’t need the light.  She could find the rest by hand if she had to.

“We should leave,” York said, quietly, and it sounded like it was directed more at himself then at her, a realization dawning, slow but inevitable.  “We need to get out of here.”

“I’m almost done,” Tex insisted, another nail falling to the ground with a muffled tinkle.  That was all of them on the top of the frame, and she moved to get at the ones near the bottom, but halfway to crouching he caught her by the elbow.

“Wait,” he said, and she turned on him with a frustrated growl.

“York—” she started, but she stopped when she saw his expression, only visible in the darkness because of how pale he had gone.

It wasn’t fear.  That was what made her pause, in the end.  He didn’t look afraid, like she might have expected from someone locked in the darkness of a haunted house, in a place that had hurt them before.  His frown was edged with desperation, yes, and he was clearly wary, but all of that was overshadowed by something else.  He looked tired.  He looked like someone caught in a nightmare that he had dreamed too many times to even find frightening anymore.  He looked like someone who only wanted to wake up, who knew he never would.

“Don’t you get it?” he murmured.  “This is how it starts.  Noises that could be anything, shadows you aren’t sure you saw, things you can explain away and ignore.  You write it off, like we did, you call it imagination or stress, paranoia, pretend there’s nothing wrong, and then suddenly you’ve got a hammer in your eye or a—a knife in your back.  _No_.  I can’t let this happen again.”

“York…”

“We should have run the last time,” he went on.  “I knew it but I didn’t push for it, I wanted to believe we would be okay.  I wanted to hope for the best.  We stayed here then, and you know what?  It was the worst fucking mistake of my life.  There is no hope left in this goddamned house, Allison, just death, and memories, and fucking shadows to get lost in.  No.  We have to leave, we have to get out of here, now, before we run out of time.”

He shook his head and let go of her arm, moving back out of her space with an attempt at a smile that slipped sideways, looked slightly ill.

“You don’t seriously want to be the person who gets themselves killed by being stupid enough to wander into an obviously haunted house at night on Halloween, do you?” he asked weakly.  “Are we turning into that trope?  Come on, you’re better than that.”

She heard his clothes rustle in the gloom of the closet, felt it as he reached out and closed his hand around the free end of the little crowbar.  He didn’t tug or pull at it, nothing so insistent; he simply waited for her to relinquish it, waited for her to see reason.  Tex couldn’t see anything at all in the darkness, but she could hear the tiny skip and shudder in his breath as he tried to stay calm, loud over the sudden silence from beyond the door.

He had wanted to come here, she reminded herself belligerently, unwilling to give up just yet.

He had wanted to move on, countered a deeper part of her, until you dragged him back into danger.  The thought was enough to still her, surprised by the sudden sympathy that she felt.  She remembered the frozen panic in his face when Wyoming lunged for him at Dymphna’s.  She remembered the grief in his voice when he talked about North, his troubled frown when they had learned of Washington’s isolation.  She thought of the heartbreak that trembled through every word he spoke of Carolina, the hope that was tied to them like a weight pulling him down.  There was more than one ghost in York’s past, and not all of them were in this house.  Not all of them could be left behind to molder in cold hallways and empty rooms.  Maybe it would be better if he dealt with the ones that followed him home.  He should be allowed to do that before she forced him to collect more.  All he wanted was to heal.

But on the other side of the door the silence waited, as it had for uncounted years, and she ached and burned to set it free and learn its secrets.

Tex shifted, ready to pull back, to push forward, but as she moved a weight in her jacket pocket thumped against the bone of her hip, heavy and metallic, and suddenly she recalled what she had tucked away inside.

A rusted old lighter, and a key.

Reluctantly, wordlessly, she let go of the crowbar.

“Thank God,” York muttered, shoving it into his back pocket and striding towards the door.  “Let’s get out of here.”

Tex stayed for a moment after he had disappeared into the gloom in the hall, running her hand over the battered doorframe, across the clawed scratches and empty holes.  Only three nails remained to keep it sealed.  Her hand closed around the doorknob, and she thought that maybe, if she pulled hard enough now, she could open it, just a crack, and peek at the other side.  Maybe, if she put her strength behind it, she could just get a glimpse…

_But there’s nothing to see in the dark,_ her thoughts growled.  _It’s a waste of time, a waste of effort.  All this way, all this time, and it’s all for nothing.  There’s nothing to see and nothing to do but run, run, run._

She yanked her hand back and curled it into a fist, shoved it into her pocket where it met cold metal.

“I’m coming back,” she said to the silence, to the darkness, to the house itself.  “Just try and fucking stop me.”

The silence went on, the darkness lay thick in the air, and the house stayed still.

Tex turned on her heel and marched away, out of the closet and into the hall.  York was waiting for her at the top of the stairs.

“Look,” he said, barely visible in what little light shone through the windows over the door.  Instead of illuminating the room it seemed to sit, pooled on the windowsills like it was trapped against the glass, unable to make its way farther inside.  Outside the sun must have been fading fast, but the contrast was enough that it hurt to look at, left her with spots in her vision.  She blinked and turned away, her gaze landing on York instead, catching how the light hit his face strangely, reflected off his prosthetic eye and made it shine an unearthly pale white.  He was looking down, down into the foyer with his hands clenched tight around the bannister, and it was like standing on a poorly lit stage and peering into an invisible audience, unknown numbers waiting in the dark.  It felt endless, like a chasm into nothing, and just standing at the edge nearly gave her vertigo.

“What the hell am I supposed to look at?” she asked irritation rolling through her as she stepped away.  “Is there something there?”

 “We’d better hope not,” York said with a small, nervous laugh.  “Because it’s the only way out.”

With an audible breath he turned and started down, and she followed, displeased with the way the darkness seemed to swallow him if she lagged too far behind.  Their footsteps were quiet on the stairs, like they were walking over black velvet, hushed and muffled where once they had echoed.  It was like being miles underwater, her breathing loud in her ears and every movement heavy.

Tex growled at herself, her fingernails digging into the meat of her palms as she clenched her fists tighter, the pain a jarring note of clarity.

Ghosts were real.  She could concede that, her pace steady and her eyes fixed forward.  She could hardly deny them now, after what she had seen, but that was no reason to let herself be frightened by the theatrics of old architecture.  It was no reason to be scared of the dark.  The spirits that walked the house had done nothing yet but play with lights and echoes.  They were hardly fearsome, and she refused to be afraid, even when every step she took down into the black pit in the center of the house felt shadowed, dogged by something just behind her, lurking, following, even when the hairs on her arms stood on end, and she imagined she could feel movement against the back of her neck.

Tex clenched her fists, grit her teeth, moved forward.  They reached the bottom of the stairs without incident, began to cross the foyer, the elaborate design of the parquet only visible as vague shapes and outlines in the darkness that seemed to seethe around them.  It was nothing, she thought.  It was just bad lighting, and she wasn’t afraid.  She wasn’t afraid, she repeated in her head, and it rang true.

She was not afraid.

She was angry.

They moved through the foyer and the darkness drifted like ink in the air, almost tangible, brushing up against her, and every inch they traveled she resented more.  When she reached dead center for the second time that day she stopped.  She stood in the encompassing darkness, her fingers aching, and stared at the nonsensical design of the floor while inside her the storm broke, like thunder in her head that drowned out the world.

“You’re a fucking coward, York,” she said, and it wasn’t loud, carried little emotion, but the words filled the air, and half a dozen feet away York paused, just in front of the door, to look back at her.  She couldn’t see his expression in the ever growing gloom, but she could imagine the traces of confusion, of alarm.

Tex bared her teeth.  She must have, because she couldn’t remember thinking that she wanted to smile.  The blackness around them was a soft blanket, a cushion against the pain in her hands.  She couldn’t feel it anymore, her head was swimming in a fog and even the house seemed far away.

“…Allison?” York asked, and he was staring at her, she could feel him looking, could hear the wary concern in his voice, but the name scraped and jangled against her nerves.  It was wrong; it wasn’t her, that wasn’t right.

“You talk about ending this but what did you even do here, huh?” she said, her voice still low and deliberate.  “You jump and run at goddamned shadows.  The wind blows and the roof creaks and suddenly there’s danger in every corner and you want to go home.  _Please_ ,” she sneered.  “What are you really afraid of, York?  Are you afraid of death?  Of your own blood?  Afraid to lose another eye?”

She laughed, and the sound was strange in her ears, distorted and wild.

“Allison!” he said again, and it only made her angrier.  It wasn’t right.  It wasn’t her.

“Why are we running?” she demanded, and the darkness seemed to ripple at the force of her voice as it rose word by word, louder and louder, but each one felt further away.  “Because you’re scared of the fucking dark?  We can’t leave yet, we haven’t done anything.  We can’t leave!  _We have to end this_.”

“TEX!”

The shout of her name was like a blast of ice water, sudden and shocking, and it snapped her back to the present with such force that she almost staggered.  She was standing in the foyer, but at some point she seemed to have taken a few steps forward without noticing, advancing towards the door, to where York was standing.

“…the fuck,” she gasped, her hand going to her head as a spike of pain lanced through her temple like a nail.  She looked up again, blinking through the haze as she tried to see around her through the thick black cloud that had fallen over them.

“York?” she called.

“Over here,” he said, and she turned to find him behind her, barely visible in the darkness, reaching out for the wall under the stairs, for the hidden basement door which was standing wide open like a gaping maw.  Without hesitation he pushed it shut, the sound of the latch catching loud in the silence.  Something in the air seemed to shift when he did it, but the gloom didn’t lighten, didn’t lift, and her head only pounded harder.  York stood there, unmoving for a moment, tension in every line of his body as his gaze slowly swept the room, as though looking for something, as though he would have any hope of finding anything in the darkness.

“Fuck, my head,” Tex mumbled, her fingers pressing against her skull like she could dig it out, tear it away and be rid of it.  “I can’t…”

“Come on,” York said quietly, crossing the floor, moving around to hug the walls and give the center of the room a wide berth.  “We have to get out of here before we run into any more trouble.”

Tex held her head in her hands, and another laugh bubbled out of her, like dark water boiling over.  God, her head ached.

“Trouble,” she echoed, and it was low, almost guttural, how could she even be making that sound?  The darkness writhed and twisted, moved through the air and behind her eyes when she closed them, pressing, questing, and her _head_ , God, it hurt.

“Trouble,” she repeated, and she was laughing again, but she didn’t know why, it wasn’t funny, there were ice shards digging into her brain, sharp claws carving a path through her mind, and still she was laughing.  “You really have no idea, do you?” she said, the words spilling out of her, unstoppable, unprompted, and why was she laughing?  “You run and hide, you cower like a dog, but it doesn’t matter.  You are a _fool_.  _You have no idea what kind of trouble you are in._ ”

On his way to the door York stumbled, stopped.  He turned around, slowly, and she could see him clearly now, as though the darkness wasn’t there, like it had seeped inside and would no longer hinder her.  She could see him, and the shock on his face made her blood boil, the way he paled made her fingers twitch, and she could see the whites of his eyes as they widened, she could see the exact moment when he began to shake.  It only made her angrier.

How dare he treat her like a child when she was so much stronger than him, so much braver.  How dare he cut and run when they were on the edge of discovery, so close she could taste it.  How dare he, _how dare he_.

There were spots in her vision, purple starbursts behind her eyes, darkness tinged with the lavender haze of twilight, and she barely registered the rage as it welled up inside her, poured in and embraced her like an old friend.

“Are you scared of the dark, York?” she taunted, the words tumbling out of her without her permission.  “Are you afraid of the things that skitter in the night, that creep through your dreams?  Or are you afraid of what the dark knows?  Coward,” she snarled.  “Fool.  That’s why you run, isn’t it?  You run and run, like she did, you run and run but you can’t move on and you can never.  Keep.  Up.  You’re always a step behind, aren’t you?  That’s why she left you, you know.  She figured it out.  That night you refuse to remember.  Did she tell you?  What set her running?  I think you know.”

She took a step, lurching, heavy, towards him, and he backed away in unison, his back hitting the front door.  He had nowhere to go, nowhere left to run, and the fury spurred her on.

“Tex…” he said, his eyes still wide, and it wasn’t right, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t her.

It wasn’t her.

“It was your fault, wasn’t it?” she growled in a voice too low.  “You and your meddling, you and your _curiosity_.  You couldn’t resist sticking your nose into anything and everything, you had to poke at the house of cards to see how sturdy it was, and _that_ was why it all came tumbling down.  That was why your friends were hurt, casualties in your little scavenger hunt, because you can’t stop yourself from picking locks, from looking for _mysteries_ , from opening doors that shouldn’t be touched, because you couldn’t leave it alone.  That was why they suffered, why they died.  You knew that, didn’t you?  That’s why you’re running now.  You know that it was your fault.”

She took another step, and laughed when he tried to back away but couldn’t, his back pressed hard against the wood and glass of the door, and it creaked under the strain.

“She knew it too,” she murmured, pressing closer.  “She tried to punish you that night, did she tell you?  Did she tell you how good it felt, her fingers closing around your throat, just seconds and a little bit of pressure away from crushing your windpipe.  It must have haunted her, that delight, that promise of revenge, of justice for all of the friends you had doomed.  Tell me, York, did she try again?  Did she wake in the dark, night after night, to find herself reaching, just a breath away from murder, just a second from finally silencing your troublesome heartbeat?”

She stepped forward, forward, close enough now to reach out and touch him, to wrap her own fingers around his neck, and he scrabbled at the door behind him, and the stutter in his breath was like music, the panic in his face was like art, but the canvas of his throat was bare and empty, and she wanted to put marks there, blues and blacks in the shape of her hands, and red red red where her fingernails cut skin.

_Yes_ , her mind whispered.  _Do it, do it, kill him, now now now, and he’ll never come back…_

She reached out, and she could feel the frantic, terrified beat of his heart under her fingers as she squeezed.

“If she won’t finish this then I will,” she hissed as he gasped for air, still scratching at the wood behind him, and she pressed harder to silence the noise.  “No, York.  Don’t try to get away.  You can’t run from this.  You’ve never been fast enough.”

Her grip tightened, to choke, to crush, to kill, darkness swimming through her vision and wrath and satisfaction singing in her blood.  It would be over soon and she’d have won, her fingerprints a beautiful necklace tattooed into his skin.  The power that surged through her was intoxicating, wild, and she gave in to the rage, drowned in it, and she gripped and squeezed, and finally—

There was a click, there was a creak, and she was falling, twisting, down, down—

They landed with a thick sound and a heavy grunt, and Tex rolled, hitting the flaking blue paint of the front porch, gasping as she fell away from York, who coughed and wheezed on the cold, hard wood.  It was a shock, like breaking the surface of a deep lake on a starless night, her senses suddenly clear again, no longer muffled, and she lay there, stunned, staring blankly at the ripples in the paint.  Her head still ached, but it was dulled, a muted pain that faded fast, and she realized with terrible clarity what she had been about to do.

“What…” she started, and then coughed.  The fall had winded her slightly, but she could breathe again soon, and she wasn’t the only one.  “What the ever-loving _fuck_ was that?” she tried again.

York laughed, a pained, half-hysterical sound that trailed off into a wretched hacking cough.

“Pretty… pretty sure… you know,” he said when he could speak again.  “Welcome… Welcome to the Church House, Tex.”

“Fucking Christ,” she breathed, propping herself up with her hands and looking back at the tall double doors.  The left side stood open.  Somehow while she had been choking the life out of him York had managed to get his hands around the doorknob, swinging it inward and then simply falling back, tripping through and bringing her down with him.  The door gaped wide, the inside too dark to make out even the barest details of the interior, like looking into a black well, and inside she could see movement, something that warped and coiled with fury and intent.  Just looking at it made her eyes hurt and her head complain, so she looked away, inched over, and hauling herself to her knees she reached over York’s prone body and into the darkness, as far as she could, until she found cold metal and yanked the door shut with enough force to make the cut glass windows rattle but not break.  She hung from the handle for an extra second, breathing hard, and refused to look and see if darkness clung to her arms in whorls and swirls, ink pressed under her skin.  She wasn’t sure what finding nothing there would mean, whether it had never been there at all or had just wormed its way too deep to see, into her bones and her blood, somewhere she could never dig it out again.

Quiet fell, but unlike the terrifying, unnatural silence of the house the air was filled with the sounds of the mountains, the whistle of the wind, the rattling branches, and the heavy sound of their breathing while they gathered themselves.  Outside the house it was twilight, a soft gray light infusing the air as the day ticked closer to night, the sun gone but the light still lingering.  It was somehow calm, even with the wind blowing through the trees and beating against the house in bursts and gusts.  The sounds of the autumn evening were a brisk reminder that they were outside again, the sting of the elements tingling in the tips of her fingers as they sat on the porch and simply breathed.

“Well,” York said eventually, his voice a scratchy rasp under forced cheer, “I don’t know about you but I think I’ve had—had enough ghost hunting for today.  I think maybe…” he coughed again.  “Maybe I’d like to go home.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.  “Yeah, you might be right.”

Shaking the feeling back into her hands, Tex braced against the door and levered herself back upright, her legs nearly frozen under her.  She stopped for a second to brush away the tiny curls of blue paint flakes that clung to her jeans, and then held out a hand to York.

He hesitated for a second, but took it, allowing her to pull him back to his feet.  He touched a hand to his throat gingerly and grimaced.

“That’s gonna be fun to explain,” he grumbled, but she wasn’t listening, her eyes roaming over the small front porch, from the flaking floor panels to the blue of the ceiling, before they finally settled back on the door, the murky windows and seething darkness behind them.

“Hey, York,” she said, her hand reaching out for the door before she realized what she was doing and halted, pulled back.  “How did you know what to do?  How did you know that getting us out the door would make it stop?”

York shrugged.

“Lucky guess, Tex.  Nothing bad ever happened _outside_ the house,” he said with a grimace.  “Not with the ghosts, anyway.”

With that he turned and made his way down the stairs, his feet hitting the gravel with a quiet crunch as he walked away.  Tex frowned at his retreating back before following after him towards the big tree they had parked under, catching up with him with long strides.

“You know, back in the house, I think that’s the first time you’ve called me Tex,” she said as they reached the car, and it was a tiny detail, a pointless thing to focus on, maybe, but it still felt important to her, like it mattered.

“Thought you might respond faster to it,” he said absently.

“Yeah, but you’re still doing it,” she pointed out with a small smile.

He laughed quietly, the sound wavering and a little off, probably painful from the damage to his throat.

“Sure,” he said, focusing on unlocking the car and opening the door and not on her face or the house behind her.  “I guess after what just happened I figure you’re one of us, now.  Congrats.”

He got in the car and shut the door, leaving Tex staring at where he had been standing.  She turned then, to look back.  The house loomed like a taunt through the fading twilight, details fuzzy and vague in the dying light, the whole building a huge dark shadow.  The trees that surrounded the clearing reached out for it with branches like spindly, brittle hands, skeletal fingers grasping at empty air in a vain supplication for something unknown.  The wind roared through, sudden and fierce, and the clatter of their bones filled the woods while the house creaked, a low, mocking tune sung over rattling applause.

The windows no longer seemed to shine, blackness rolling behind them, impenetrable and ethereal.  Her gaze moved to the broken eye of the attic, watching still, and waiting, always.  She narrowed her eyes against the sting of the wind, but she saw nothing.  Whatever it was that dwelled up there was not so easily found.  Maybe it was standing, static, in that bleak space behind the attic door, frozen in time until someone else was willing to turn the handle and set it free.  She thought of reaching hands and dripping blood, of secrets locked away, of anger that burned a path through the mind and left ashes in its wake and rage in the marrow of her bones.

Ghosts were real, she thought, but that didn’t change anything.  Behind every murder was someone with blood on their hands.  Sometimes that person stood a little further back in the shadows of history, that was all.  Sometimes they gave a voice to the darkness, a whisper on the way to madness.  Or maybe the person she was looking for was much closer, turning a key and sealing up the past.  What sort of weapon was the instrument of suicide, she wondered.  What sort of person could wield it?

A mystery was only a mystery until it was solved, she remembered, and her jacket pocket lay heavy against her hip, weighed down by the cold metal of a broken lighter and a rusted old key.

She turned and got inside the car.

“Finally,” York said, starting the engine with a rumble she felt in her bones.  “I was starting to think you were planning to stick around for _next_ Halloween.”

Tex snorted, one hand going to her pocket to run a finger over jagged metal.

“Nah,” she said, glancing sideways at the bruises starting to form on his neck, the shape of her hands red against his skin.  They would fade eventually, red to black and purple, green and yellow, a rainbow of colors that would disappear with time, but she had a feeling she would remember each one long after they were gone.  “I think I’ve had enough for now.”

 

 

 

The drive back to town was pensive, both of them lost in their own thoughts and revelations.  It was dark by the time they made it to their destination, the stars obscured by clouds.  York pulled into the parking lot by the criminology building, back into the same space they had started from, and for a second they sat in the harsh glow of the overhead street lights.

“Last stop,” he said eventually, and it sounded like an ending.

Tex nodded and opened the door, but when her feet hit the pavement she stopped, suddenly unwilling to leave it like that.

“Hey, York,” she said, turning back to him.

“Yeah?” he said tiredly.

“Thanks,” she told him.  “And… sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he replied, waving his hand dismissively, and his tone was heavy.  “It wasn’t your fault, really.”

That was a whole can of worms that she didn’t feel qualified to open.  Still, she hesitated.

“Look,” she said.  “Maybe you don’t want to hear this from me, especially after I asked you to bring me there, but… this whole _moving on_ thing… Maybe I was wrong, alright?  Maybe it’s more about moving forward than looking back.  But if you want closure, if you want answers… start with what you know.  That shit you said about CT?  That’s pretty fucked up.  If you really think something screwy happened there, maybe that’s what you should look into.  Just letting it go doesn’t sound like justice to me.  And your friends Washington and Wyoming… I don’t know about Washington, but if what happened to Wyoming was anything like what happened to me… dunno if locking them up is really the best solution.”

York didn’t say anything, but his hands were tight around the steering wheel, for all that the car was parked.

“And maybe I don’t have a goddamned clue what I’m talking about,” Tex continued, eying the way his knuckles went white, “but… well, if I were you I’d think pretty hard about what’s stopped me from digging into it before now.  If you’re running or waiting or just… hoping too much for something that’s never going to happen.  You shouldn’t be afraid to look for the truth.  You can’t let what someone might say stop you from trying, especially if they already left you behind.”

He didn’t respond to that either, but his face said enough with just the knit of his brow.  Tex shrugged.  She’d said her piece.

“Well, York, I can’t say you don’t know how to show a girl a wild time,” she said, leaning back to smack him playfully on the shoulder before getting out of the car.

“I’ll see you around,” she promised.

York smiled faintly.

“See you around, Tex.”

 

*

 

Tex found them in the dining hall at lunch on Sunday.  It wasn’t hard to spot their little trio, even though they were hidden away in a back corner by the fire exit.  Gates was waving his arms animatedly while his friend with the ponytail stared down a chicken sandwich with a little too much intensity, and Mason listened with an exasperated expression.  She didn’t know what they were discussing, or if it was an active conversation at all and not just Gates spinning tales again, but it didn’t really matter, because the talking came to an abrupt halt when she waltzed up and tossed the rusted blue lighter onto the cafeteria table between them.

The three of them stared at it, nonplussed.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Gates said finally.  “What the hell is this?”

He picked it up, pinching it between his finger and thumb like he thought it might be diseased or prone to exploding, and Tex had to bite back the impulse to tell him to drop it, it wasn’t his.

“Proof,” she said instead.  “ _That_ came out of a nightstand in the Church House.  Went up there yesterday, had a party.”

“You _what_ ,” Mason said weakly.

“And now,” she went on, ignoring the interruption, “I believe you owe me some money.”

For a fraction of a second Gates froze, then he set the lighter back down somewhat delicately on the table and sat back, crossing his arms.

“Do I?” he said loftily.  “Because if I recall correctly there was a second part to that bet.  You were supposed to come back with real answers about what happened up there.  _Solve the mystery_ ,” he said, wriggling his fingers like a douchebag, “or whatever.”

“You want to know what’s really behind all the stories?” she asked, putting one hand flat on the table and leaning in, leaning over him and forcing him to look up at her just to keep her in his line of sight.  “What really caused all that horrible shit to happen?”

“Enlighten me,” he said snidely, narrowing his eyes.

Tex grinned.

“Ghosts,” she said.  And that was it.

Gates gaped at her for a full ten seconds, and next to him Mason coughed to hide a snicker.  Their quiet friend shook his head, but she could see something of a smirk in the way his scowl lightened.

“Are you _shitting me?_ ” Gates spluttered.  “That’s a fucking cop-out and you know it!  Besides,” he added, shoving at the rusted lighter so that it skittered back across the table towards her, “how do I even know this piece of crap came from the house in the first place?  It looks like you picked it up off the side of the road.”

Tex laughed.

“What are you gonna do about it, fight me?” she asked, grinning wider.  “Go ahead.  I’m not afraid of _the dead_ , asshole, what makes you think I’d ever be afraid of you?”

He didn’t have an answer for that, like it hadn’t occurred to him that she wasn’t interested in playing his game, that she was more than happy to change the rules.

“Whatever,” was the biting retort he eventually came up with.  “I’m not paying up for a crappy old lighter you found in a ditch and a one-word story that I already knew.”

“If you want to be known as a little weasel who won’t settle his bets, then sure,” she said, amiably enough she thought, picking the lighter back up and flicking it open, playing with it even as she savored the sour look on his face.  “You said I had to bring you an answer.  You never said it had to be the right answer, or even a new one.”

“You motherfu—”

“Maybe we can all just agree to disagree,” Mason broke in diplomatically.  “Nobody has to pay anyone and nobody has to break any more laws.  How about that?”

“If you want,” Tex agreed, her thumb flicking idly at the flint wheel.  “I don’t really give a shit, anyway.  I already found what I wanted.”

“Yeah?” Gates said skeptically, “and what’s that, exactly?”

“Ghosts,” she said again, grinning like a shark as she flicked the lighter one more time.

It lit.

She laughed at the expressions on their faces, snapped the lighter shut, and strolled away.

 

*

 

In the years that followed Tex discovered that York was right about one thing; the real world wasn’t like a novel or a movie, and it didn’t stop when the excitement died.  Reality didn’t simply fade to black, it was never that neat.  Instead it peppered her dreams with dripping blood and quiet strangling sobs, with a silence that lived in the spaces between walls, and a darkness that consumed.  Reality was waking up at night with the memory of her friend’s throat under her hands, with a tingle in her fingers and a twitch in her muscles, with the insidious regret that it had ended there, with dreams that it hadn’t.  Reality was shaking in the early hours of the morning and chanting that it wasn’t true, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t _her_.  It was trying to scrub the darkness out from under her skin, from behind her eyes, and failing, always.

The reality was that life moved on, at whatever pace it chose, and all she could do was try to keep up.

She didn’t go back to the house.  Not for a long time.

Tex graduated, she got a job, she put food on the table and money in her pockets.  She got her criminology degree, but joining the police force was a bust, too restrictive, too many rules and not enough fun.  She enjoyed solving a mystery here and there, but her blood sang for the hunt.  So she lived a life on the move, gave chase to the lowest kind of scum and reaped the bounty.  She roamed the state, but somehow she always came back to that town in the mountains, the asylum on the hill, the quiet, empty hollows between the peaks.  When the rage vibrated in her bones until she shook she’d call up York for nights out at a bar, tease him about joining the fuzz when she was out doing the real work, and shove him when he complained about paperwork and crooked cops, about digging through a metric ton of shit and never finding enough to make a solid case.  They would drink and laugh, and dance around a subject that filled the air like crisp cold in autumn, like sobbing in the night.

She didn’t go back, but she thought about it.  Sometimes when she couldn’t sleep she would stare at the ceiling of her most recent hotel room and imagine that it shifted in the wind with a creak that sounded like footsteps.  She would think of a face in the window, a smirk over a slash of vivid red, the pounding of her heart when she met it head on, and a cycle of grief that only ended once someone else intervened.  When the night moved like winter, slow and dark and leaving her ever colder, she would think of gray walls and tall windows, of patience and despair and the fine line between them, of locked doors and secrets waiting to be discovered.  Then she would think of darkness that had claws and teeth, and she would turn on the bedside lamp and curl her fingers into fists to keep them from digging through her skin to the darkness in her blood.  The next day she would move faster and hit harder, and never look back.

Some mysteries took more time than others.  Sometimes you needed to grow before you could even try to solve them.

So she didn’t go back, but still that key burned in her pocket, where she kept it through the years, on a ring with other keys that meant less but were used more, next to a lighter that never seemed to work.  She didn’t go back, and then one day in a dingy gas station outside of Fayetteville she caught sight of a headline.

_Murder,_ it read, _Corruption at Dymphna’s._

“Hey, give me the paper, too,” she said, throwing it on top of her more typical purchase of beef jerky and salt and vinegar chips.  She took it outside and shook it open in the car, salt on her tongue as she read through allegations of abuse, paperwork forged to keep people locked inside, psychological experiments, and about the policemen who bent under the Director’s will and his money, who had covered up the murder of a journalist who had gotten too close and sent her car over a cliff.

“Son of a bitch,” she muttered with a smile when she caught York’s name in the text.  It looked like he got his justice after all.

“They’re forcing me to resign over technicalities,” he told her cheerfully when she called him later.  “Getting into shit I wasn’t supposed to be looking at, and all that crap, but I made sure it’s all admissible.  The Director’s going to pay.”

“Think you’ll need any help with that?” she asked, considering the miles between her and the mountains, and how likely a man like that was to run, how much she wanted to chase him down.

“I’ll know who to call if we do,” he replied.

“I’ll head over, be around if you need me,” she promised.  “What are you going to do next?”

“Now that I’ve won the Super Bowl, you mean?” he laughed.  “Disney World might be a little out of my budget, especially unemployed.” 

“It’s this awful economy,” she teased.

“Don’t I know it,” he replied.  “I figure if they won’t take me in another district I can always get a job as a locksmith.  Getting a license can’t be that hard.”

“You planning on staying in town?”

He hesitated for a moment, and when he answered she could hear the wistful smile in his voice, sad and sweet but not bitter.

“Nah,” he said quietly.  “I don’t think I’ll stick around.  There’s not really much keeping me here anymore.  Time to move on.”

Tex smiled.

“Sounds like a plan,” she said.  “I’ll see you around, York.”

“See you around, Tex.”

It sounded like an ending, but not for her.

Tex drove back to the mountains the next day.  The Director did run, but not to a place that she could ever track him, not to a place he could ever come back from.  No one was even sure why he had the gun.

There was no work for her there, but she stayed when she could, watched as Dymphna’s reorganized, reassessed, rebuilt.  The Director’s life work was a knot of lies and cruelty, and she watched the news stories unravel the tangle, poke through the ashes.  They talked about CT as a journalist, a whistleblower who was framed and murdered while the cops turned a blind eye and lined their pockets.  They talked about the suffering and damage selected residents of the hospital had endured in the name of twisted science.  They talked about patients being released after too long being held against all reason.

They rarely talked about the house.  It was old news, after all, an urban legend now more than the truth.  It was just an old building in the woods, isolated, ancient, a place that superstitious children were afraid of.  There was nothing there.  It was empty.

Until, years later, it wasn’t.

_Rooms for rent,_ said the advertisement, stapled to a bulletin board outside the dining hall on campus.  Tex was only there to give a talk to the criminology students on the life of a bounty hunter, not her usual fare but she needed money whenever she stayed in town for a while and it was always fun to see the looks on their faces when they saw her walk in, small and blond and ready to lay a man out if he glanced at her wrong.  It had been an amusing afternoon and she was heading back to her shitty hotel room after a shitty cafeteria meal.  She didn’t know why the little flyer caught her eye, but it did, and once she saw it she couldn’t move on.

_Rooms for rent_ , it said, _Cheap.  Out of the way Victorian mountain house, single room occupancy.  Six bedrooms._

The address was listed as Bottle Tree Lane.

Tex tore the flyer from the cork board and stared at it.  Who would be renting out the house?  With the Director dead—but he had a daughter, she remembered.  Carolina, whose father died drowning in legal fees and court ordered restitutions.  Carolina, who believed the ghosts were gone.  Carolina, who had been wrong before.

_Call for more information,_ the flyer said.

Tex balled it up and marched to the nearest garbage can, but stopped short, the paper crinkling in her fist as she hesitated.  Straightening the flyer back out again, she looked at the phone number and thought of what waited in that house, what sobbed in the shadows, what prowled the halls, what could happen to people who didn’t understand, and what they might discover without her. 

Would Carolina rent to a woman who called herself Texas, she wondered slowly, and looking at that ad, those stark numbers black on white, something in her shifted, settled, and said _finally_.

Tex smiled.

Carolina might not care for Tex’s chosen name, she might even refuse to let her into the house, but it didn’t really matter.  It was hardly going to stop her.  She shoved the paper into her pocket, her knuckles scraping against cold metal as she did, and turned to go back to her car, back to her hotel, back to pack her things.

A mystery was only a mystery until it was solved, she reminded herself, and sometimes all you really had to do was wait for the right time.  She turned the key in her car and reveled in the purr of the engine, the beginning of a new chase.  As she drove off campus she looked to the mountains, to the trees that blew in the whistling wind and the hollows that lay silent between them.  She could feel it out there, standing tall and strong against the wind, against the years, waiting for someone to pry open its locks and finally be brave enough to set free what lay within.  Mystery filled her mind with secrets to unearth, murders to solve.  Darkness burned in her blood, simmering rage and power that never seemed to fade.

And in her pocket was a rusted old key.


End file.
